A Martian Poet in Siberia

On Level 2 light floods into the ship from the port; a torrent of photons pours mercilessly onto the gaunt, grey face of Xing, the skin sucked in tight between the jaw and cheek bones as if inside there's a vacuum. When we roll the hab he can see Earth; he spends a lot of time looking out now. His breathing is fast. He is in great distress, even with the drugs. He eats little; swallowing is difficult. We can't rig up a drip, fluids don't drip in zero G, and when we try to inject under pressure he bruises so badly he asks us to stop. We are nearly there, just a couple of weeks out. Zhudi sits with him - she holds his hand against her belly; he closes his eyes. Zhuangzi, yes, Zhuangzi, what did he say? He feels the kicks, the start of a cycle he is soon to complete. Inside his head he speaks through his hand to himself in the womb:

We are one, little one, he tells himself; I live on through you; and feels a bit better. Ji - san - ji - san - accumulation, dispersion, accumulation, dispersion, on and on without extinction the qi remains, the eternal float.

Maybe that was wrong, my macabre vision of Xing eviscerated, eaten by vultures - too human, too man-centered.

This from Jeffers? Vulture, half a century before the millennium, which I had read avidly in my late teens.

And from Lew Welch, a few years later, the same relaxed perspective, the bird of death as bird of re-birth and continuance:

But it was difficult for me, then, and still is, to make that conceptual leap, to separate death from extinction, cause from effect, to feel instead the whole resonating as one, a mutual interdependence in which linearity disappears. He knew I would have none of it; my grandmother had seen to that: the sharpness of the knife disappears when the blade breaks she told me more than once. She devoured the sceptics - Wang Chong, Fan Chen, Liu Qi, Huan Tan and the many others - and made sure I knew about them too.