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Poems by Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
Orbiter
for E. N. Jackson
Fascinating how oblique guidance & controls (feather to failure)
wash up gullies & layers of evaporative lakes. Cerberus,
littered with rocks, sees aromatic hydrocarbons & thermocouples
recede despite Sojourner’s rover gimballing for truth, dust devils
spinning, rocker-boogie mobility. If only this vortex was visible
from Olympus Mons (dark streaks on rippled flats)
Utopia Planitia is what they left, ice spreads a hydrosphere
of cadmium red, bacterial precipitation hovers near penetrated
fractures. Voyager scrapes Syrtis Major, Tharsis Montes,
Ares Vallis throngs down. Just the same (rocks) grooved & fluted,
frictional drag belies carbonate globules (entry to landing).
We’re determined to find liquid water, in spite of the odds indicating
ejection. (We’ll land. We’ll experiment. We’ll find out why & if,
*
traces. 2.3 billion bits.
Tongue like spongy rock, bone to dunefield. Phobos & Deimos pocked
with impact craters. Thaumasia is this place transverse to the valley;
liken my state of mind to polar night (multi-spectral) everyday.
A determined body can be repurposed, a body can be changed.
687 earth days (a sol) solder our differences, sockets & pebbles
pitch & yaw, striations landslide circumpolar, like small dry channels
confirming ancient flow. Sojourner roves as barchans migrate Amen’s.
Thirty years probing Aeolian winds. If only this crust could stop leaching.
Valles Marineris is a hole we can’t scale. Mars reminds me of you.
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