Excerpts from Camouflage, MaCaHu Press 2010

Stacy Nathaniel Jackson

Cover art by Mary Behm-Steinberg

Acknowledgements

The following poems or previous versions have been published in print

or on-line:

“Orbiter”, Mary Magazine

“Planitia”, Black Arts Quarterly

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 Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
snathanieljackson@yahoo.com

Orbiter

for E. N. Jackson

1.

Fascinating how oblique guidance &

controls (lift-off to failure) wash up on
dry gullies & layers of evaporative
lakes.

Cerberus is still littered with rock &

crater
NASA rovers continue to hunt for truth.
Dust devils spin. Weightless. Camouflaged.

If only this vortex was visible from

Olympus Mons (dark streaks on
rippled flats), they might find it again.
Utopia Planitia is

where I live. Illiquid ice spreads a thin

veneer of cadmium red. Bacterial
precipitation bubbles inside fossil-less

fractures. Voyager scrapes Syrtis

Major, then Tharsis Montes, Ares Vallis
next to be mapped. Just the same
rocks grooved & fluted, (entry to
landing).

We are determined to
find liquid water, despite odds to the
contrary.

We’ll land.
We’ll experiment. Find out why & if,

traces. 2.3 billion bits.

-2-
 Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
snathanieljackson@yahoo.com

Orbiter (cont.)

2.

My tongue like spongy rock (bone to

dune field) or like Phobos & Deimos
pocked by impact craters. In my
dreams, Thaumasia is my hiding
place; liken it to my state of mind:
a polar night
(multi-
spectral)

A determined body can be

repurposed.
A body can be changed. 687 earth
days (a sol) sockets & pebbles, pitch &
yaw, striations landslide circumpolar,
like small dry channels confirming
ancient flow.

Though you’re gone, Sojourner still

roves as barchans blow Amen’s. Thirty
years probing Aeolian winds. If only
this crust could stop leaching—

Valles Marineris is a crater I can’t

scale.
Mars reminds me of you.

-3-
 Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
snathanieljackson@yahoo.com

< Camouflage

Somewhere tolerance
skims the bottom.

shaken.
stirred.

-4-
 Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
snathanieljackson@yahoo.com

Planitia

When her body calmed and became reconciled to reanimation,

she looked around. The room seemed dimly lit, though she had never
Awakened to dimness before.

—from Octavia E. Butler’s “Dawn”

This time the sand floated up to the

bottom. Ochre light slipped below
each verdigris row. Seekers have tried
to latch Mars, but our crater is lined
with dusty hollows, flat horizons, fields
and fields of uninterrupted rock (not a
mirage). Unreachable light years
become billions.

The indelible marks of our past shaped

like stones dropped in soft mud. We
have been told to adapt to day in
order to borrow polar night. Gas
becomes cud. Methane simmers
slowly. Dust seas, predicted to
moisten rivers of rock, peaks and
lakes on the rim of a bed. But myth
has its limitations, especially stories
conjuring beginnings. I am not one to
believe everything I have been told.

We have two moons, this I know.

Subsurface, a form never drifts
beyond the imagined. In the fog,
yellow and red transpose recognition.
Our transference of life into sand, a
reality previously considered
unconscionable.
Splintered imagoes.

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 Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
snathanieljackson@yahoo.com

Planitia (cont.)

We watch from our planet’s core.

Rubber wheels and spectrometers
propel their so-called rovers.
Sideways velocity can only carry you
so far. Flats, gorgeous canyons, and
sandy layers stretch beyond an
ordinary crater’s mouth, an existence

without liquid or consumable air.

Subsurface, neither flamed debris nor
asteroid can extinguish living thought.
Our ancestors are nanofossils.
And the polar sea,

I am content inside. Not because dust

devils are predicted to reverse course
or winter’s revolving is set to claim a
new spring. I slip to the surface
unnoticed, watch the sand float as
they land.

There is this thread of bliss, watching

seekers propel beyond Earth, testing
and retesting surface evolution,
spinning theories of their own in the
yellow light of another day.

-6-
 Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
snathanieljackson@yahoo.com

> Camouflage

Somewhere bottom
scratches floor.

Knee
deep.

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