All Mars can see, bolted in place,
is the sky. She recites red sky at night, sailor’s
delight until her atmosphere shimmers.
She wants to be visible from everywhere,
the brightest storm brewing
in this big wide sea. She converts sensations
into units of distance and units of force,
so that each time a body collides with her,
she can add it to her catalogue of impact:
where, how hard,
how long the tremor. She lifts the oxide dust
gently from a crater and says asteroid
at an oblique angle, seventy-eight miles across.
She does this just by feel. No looking.
Which might be why
she so loves the probes. When they land,
she goes as still as she can, so they won’t startle
and unlatch. She wants them always charting
her shoal plains. When one enters
her gravity too slowly
and bounces away, she wonders what
went wrong. She imagines it lost
out there, how it wanted her, couldn’t
touch her, or stay.
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