PSYCHOLOGY FROM MARS

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Maxwell Bodenheim
Torban flattered the details
Of his festival in brown—a beard—
With fingers that held a musical length,
And spoke of psychology.
The clever reproduction
Of a human being,
His appearance lacked
A hairsbreadth of reality
And barely failed to convince.
His eyes, assemblages of planets
Miraculously dwarfed, were small
But did not hold the shifting gluttony
Common to little eyes.
His lips were unsubstantial fibres
And the straight line of his nose
Gained an unearthly sincerity.
His body was muscular but failed to reveal
The smug delusion of superiority
That lives within physical strength.
With a voice in which pity and satire
Mingled bewilderedly with each other,
He spoke of psychology.
“Normal and average men
On Mars are charged with being
Insane and distorted oracles.
Because they desire to resemble each other
We force them to live together
On drably elaborate plateaus.
There they fashion cities—
Geometrical madness
That censures shreds of dread and unrest
Within the spaces of its heart.
There they retreat to farms,
And the disciplined exhaustion
Of their lives reclines upon
Monotonous rewards known as harvests.
They cling to homes—slumbering alcoves
Plentifully supplied
With complimenting mirrors
And altars for the mind.
Sometimes a revolution
Seduces their living flatness,
And an original confusion
Follows rumours of creation,
But the sanity vanishes
Into the marching unison
Of their repentant madness.
We who are sane live below the plateaus.
‘Home’ to us is a flitting answer:
Different spots inevitably
Transformed by our bodies garlanded with mind,
Or requests of the heart
That tarry a moment for shelter.
As we wander we tear
And rebuild ancient lanes and houses,
Leaving a sentinel of change
Behind to confront the next traveller.
We stroll in twos and threes
That endure for a day or an hour,
And we never linger
At one place to gloat over details.
Restless sanity, my friend,
Equips the changing cries within us.
Restless sanity
Prevents us from complacently
Dozing over miniatures,
With a dream of importance
Rocking within the rhythms of our hearts!”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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