The Landing - from the "Voices and Visions" Fort Mason Printmakers portfolio

Chris Knipp

From the portfolio of 22 etchings by 22 artists, titled "Voice and Visions: A Book of Poems and Etchings." Printed by the Fort Mason Printmakers in San Francisco under the direction of Eleanor Rappe, each work was inspired by a poem of the artist's choice, corresponding to their assigned category: Part I, Of Love and Loss; Part II, Upon the Earth; Part III, Under the Heavens; Part IV, Journeys of the Mind; and Part V, Metamorphoses.

This print is from the third category: Under the Heavens. Its corresponding poem was "Planet Eight" by Robert Watson:

We clambered down in airtight suits to the ground / Of Planet Eight where the temperature / For us was cold. The sky was green and windless, / Our feet sank into dust that felt like fur. / We marched toward mounds and tall stones we thought / Must be a town, marched through a plain of dust / Where nothing grew, no tracks of bird or beast. Under the layer of dust was a crust / Of rock. Our mallets tapped the house-high mounds. / We bored holes. Our gloves rubbed dust from walls of stone. / We found no sign of doors, no carved words. / A light flashed from our capsule, then our phone / Clicked with orders to return. That was all / I saw on Planet Eight, that stillbirth / Or corpse: we would have welcomed rats or flies. / But on the long weightless flight back to earth / With my life's high point shrinking to star size, / I dwell on the dust, the stone mounds, a life / Without life. I land on our stranger planet: / I look out with hostile eyes.