The Canals of Mars, by B. Fulton Jennes

Martian Canals, by Percival Lowell (USA) 1894

The Canals of Mars

Percival Lowell mapped
      the canalis of Mars,
 
gave the features he saw 
      a noble purpose:
 
to funnel polar ice melt
      to a parched and dying planet. 
 
And those straight lines--
      more Klee than Miró--
 
evinced a civilization
      at peace: no enemy borders 
 
to bypass, shortest-distance
      salvation for all.
 
Now we see Lowell’s
      hypothesis of hope
 
as the failing of flawed optics: 
      the coursing canals 
 
he spent his life mapping, 
      defending, were but 
                                                                                                                
the life-giving blood vessels
      of his own inner eye, 
 
reflected in a glass pupil
      starved of light,
 
fed to a brain 
      thirsting for grace.
​
B. Fulton Jennes
​
The Poet Laureate of Ridgefield, Connecticut, B. Fulton Jennes serves as poet-in-residence for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her poems have or will appear in The Comstock Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Night Heron Barks, Connecticut River Journal, ArtAscent, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, Naugatuck River Journal, Frost Meadow Review, and other publications, and her poem “Lessons of a Cruel Tide” was awarded first place in the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition in the rhyming poetry category. Jennes’s chapbook, Blinded Birds, will be published by Finishing Line Press in the fall of 2021. She lives in the wooded ridges of a small Connecticut town.