Poems by Rosemary Norman from videos by Stuart Pound click here for synopses & stills, clips & index LIFE ON MARS, 1997 The cold is bitter here. Still, on the warmest days I work without a jacket. I stoop and dip my fingers, powder them Mars red with the soft rusts the wind brings in, and sketch my rosy ghosts ogling each other, ordering lost cocktails at the windswept bar where nothing, only a fractured and abstracted pink and gold, is what it was, endures. The wind comes in again. They lean easily on its long, solo blow. Loose-livers, all. And the wind run loose among them circulates this gorgeous dust. Volcano, crater, canyon. Earth words rehearse themselves. The voice, my own, is paced and sure, as if recorded once and then forgotten. Voice or voice-over. Nothing, it says. No-one. Yet gravity is low. I am borne up. Who could discover lifelessness in such workable ochres?