Earth Day
from “Selected Works of Kaia MareImbrium”
Everyone’s wearing green today, or blue,
and some have long-haired wigs; I’m not sure why.
A paper dragon winds through the parade
with plastic face and fifty human legs,
and bells and whistles sound throughout the crowd,
and once or twice a personal alarm.
I do not share their mood, or understand;
it feels more like a battle, like a war,
and I make my escape the best I can,
past the Starbucks booth–as if you couldn’t find
their stores on every corner of the street.
“All water synthesized on premises”
their signs say, even when, as in this booth,
it’s patently untrue. I buy a cup
and struggle like a salmon through the crowd
(I’ve never seen the salmon, and, you know,
most people haven’t–but the phrase remains),
and when the press of bodies is too much
the aroma of my coffee gives me strength,
the rippled cardboard holder in my hand
restores my balance through my fingertips,
and I escape. The crowd is now behind.
I hear their cheers, their clatter, and their sirens,
but like a distant thunder. I can breathe.
I make my way. The skylights will be packed
with tourists on the observation decks;
I do not even bother going there
but take the long walk to the outer rim.
The taxis stop for me; I wave them on,
the rickshaw bikers too; I let them pass,
a drunken stranger coming from a bar
says “Hey baby.” I fix him with my eye.
He stumbles, hesitates, then steps aside.
I walk until I reach the Eastern Gate
and there I rent a suit and go outside
(my own’s in storage back at the hotel).
It’s quiet now–for the first time today.
I’m not the only one; there’s people here
in scattered tiny groups, and some alone,
their glass-domed faces gazing at the sky.
I follow where they look and pick her out,
with naked eye for the first time this year,
the reason for the fireworks inside,
that blue-green pinprick, mother of us all,
the place where water falls out of the sky,
and you could even drink it, long ago.
Where ancients wondered, once upon a time,
if there was water here, because they saw
the long canals carved out by Martian winds.
I wish I could go back in time and say,
“Stay home, protect the water that you have;
there’s nothing here but tourist traps and noise.”
I breathe a heavy sigh, not even worried
about the cost of air. I wander out
and walk the planet’s surface by myself
past honeymooners walking hand in hand,
past glass-roofed buses with their lights all out,
past a circle of neo-Druids in heavy cloaks
over their suits, dark green against red ground.
I walk until I cannot see the crowd,
a mound conceals the lighting from the dome,
I see a woman sitting there, alone.
I find her channel and I say hello.
She crackles back across my intercom.
“It’s strange,” she says. “I’m red-green color blind,
so all this Martian rock you see around
to me looks just like photographs of Earth,
but I can feel the difference in my bones.
“I wonder–long ago–what it was like
to walk in open sky and breathe the air
in forests that had grown there on their own.”
“I know,” I say, and gaze up at the Earth.
“I wonder what it’s like to have a home.”
And we sat there and watched the Earth together
all night, until my oxygen ran low
(cheap, rented suit) and we went back inside
and found ourselves an all-night coffee house
with hydroponic wood on all the walls
and shared a plate of fries, and talked about
our pasts, our plans, our hopes, our obligations,
and as the early customers filed in
we paid our check and went out on the street,
climbed up the metal stairs to the nearest skylight,
stepped over people camped out on the platform,
and watched the sun rise as the sleepers stirred.
And that was Earth Day. She went to her job
and I back to my room in the hotel
and lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling,
engrossed in thought, and crazy with fatigue:
When all we have is crafted by machines,
maybe finding a friend is as close as we come to home.
Originally published in Aria Kalsan Anthology: Mysteries of the Future.
