The Heart of Mars

The Heart of Mars

The sky melts in icy whimsy, in raindrops or sleet. It falls in rocks of hail or hangs in the sky as floating hills of powdery snow. Upon them and within them the figures slide, prance, roar, plead. Sometimes the sky lays down stalactites of ice, as if the sea were but a maze of icy bars around which the wailing figures dance and complain, while the ocean, like some beast, rises in geysers to press itself against the solid sky, sometimes breaking through and exploding upward, raging and bubbling to the frigid surface in immense columns which you can see as you circle the moon, as if the ocean itself were building castles of ice to beguile the living to the moon’s frozen, dead surface. Sometimes, below, there is only the ocean and the wind and the slap and howl of weather on this moon where the weather itself is almost alive. And sometimes everything stops and it is deadly silent. Often there is so much death imitating life that it is hard to tell the difference.