Field Notes: Copy

—at the Mars Desert Research Station, Crew 141

On a rail by the Hab, a lizard pumps and stares.Jumpsuit orange, air pack and bubble, we’re eithersetting the rover down or we’re picking it up.Palimpsests of reference and gap: copiousunconformity. A few yards awaysomeone’s built a low stone wall,mock ruin of the extirpatedbehind which striped dunes rise, gonethose Mesozoic shallows, boiling dehy dinnerinside, water trucked from Hanksville.Levels drop. Bats fly at dusk. Newsfrom Earth: the latestmelt and failure, some static.Voles soaked in burrowgasoline, the tortoise by a tire.That high up, before the long haul out, would we seewhite plumes across the greenest basin?Air quavers with waves that finddismay and abundance, checkmarksin a logbook so when CapCom tells ussomething we should know, we copy that.Missing all the bodies we could touch,we ground-truth primroseand vetch, violet and white, on the desert floor all the way to Skyline Rim, to Factory Butte,mica glinting under finches and in the cougar’s tracks.What will Mars look like, extrapolating stamensto the Tharsis Bulge? A bit like southern Utah.Small craft will ply the Herschel Strait with palletsof iambs and RTGs once we’ve thumpedthe ice caps with articulate heat. Our Little Boat.You can open a book when you sit on the desertbehind the Hab because between oneairlock and the GreenHab doorthere’s a tunnel, imaginary, a metal gratewith neither vine nor fabric.We walk there without our suits,as though the seal were complete, asin a hallway from structure to structure,auspicious canopy.But body struggles to pretendthere isn’t Terran sun, kind windof warming May. Body knowswe better take along. Bodyhas what those dunes know.Only body slides the cursor, and thingsscuttle in, much to our enchantment, and the plantsare sprouting, night crawlers writhingin soil that we’ve made—replicaMartian regolith—numbered plastic cups,cattails whose shots could lashnew portage across the deepest canyon,our gutted ark become a whiptail there.