^{After Edward Said}

Every empire tells its subjects a story
of revelation. The trees let down
their aging leaves, listless
in late drought. The children thrive on filtration,
their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.

Every empire seems invincible
as its borders submerge, its manicured hillsides
incinerate between guaranteed
next-day deliveries.

Every empire eulogizes
its value system, splurges
for pyrotechnics, decorates
its mausoleums for the holidays.

Every empire turns
against its colonies, cradling
the embassy’s crystal in bubble wrap,
packing extra treats for the dogs on the evacuation flight home.

Every empire promises
a revolution against itself. The children
are tasked with designing the future, growing
walls of hydroponic greens,
rebranding old protest anthems.
Every empire denies the iceberg
it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.

Every empire sings itself a lullaby.

I stay at an underwater hotel
My room cost $40,000 per night
But I used my hotel points I earned
From all the traveling I have done over the years
My room’s floor-to-ceiling windows look out into the royal purple waters
A Convict Surgeonfish swims by
Its electric blue body tilts as it veers to my left
Two snorkelers dive below me
Paying close attention to the rapidly changing current

And watching out for the camouflaged stone fish
Whose spine releases a poison that can cause paralysis
There is no antidote for its venom
Glad that I’m far from the crowds
And in my room relaxing

I dine at the underwater hotel
My table placed against the glass windows
The deep waters below me
And shallow waters above me
I look through the glass ceiling
And see a white light at the top,
Which is a reflection of the sunlight

I visit the underwater hotel’s spa
Tucked underneath white sheets
With hot stones placed on my upper back, neck and shoulders
I close my eyes
Hearing the sounds of rainfall, breaking waves, wind,
Landslides and earthquakes from the depths below
As I get massaged by candlelight

I depart the underwater hotel
The boat taking me back to shore
Where I meet a taxi that takes me to the airport
We glide over turquoise, shallow waters
I look behind me
I see the hotel becoming smaller and smaller
And the deep waters becoming a darker and darker blue
A storm is approaching
The sky reflects how I feel
Now that my solo vacation has come to an end

The morning is clouded and the birds are hunched,

More cold than hungry, more numb than loud,

This crisp, Arizona shore, where desert meets

The coming edge of the winter world.

It is a cold news in stark announcement,

The myriad stars making bright the black,

As if the sky itself had been snowed upon.

But the stars—all those stars,

Where does the sure noise of their hard work go?

These plugs sparking the motor of an otherwise quiet sky,

Their flickering work everywhere in a white vastness:

We should hear the stars as a great roar

Gathered from the moving of their billion parts, this great

Hot rod skid of the Milky Way across the asphalt night,

The assembled, moving glints and far-floating embers

Risen from the hearth-fires of so many other worlds.

Where does the noise of it all go

If not into the ears, then hearts of the birds all around us,

Their hearts beating so fast and their equally fast

Wings and high songs,

And the bees, too, with their lumbering hum,

And the wasps and moths, the bats, and the dragonflies—

None of them sure if any of this is going to work,

This universe—we humans oblivious,

Drinking coffee, not quite awake, calm and moving

Into the slippers of our Monday mornings,

Shivering because, we think,

It’s a little cold out there.

The years are piling up like Appalachian snow but I still feel sad that David Berman is dead, a long-burning suicide born of addiction and despair after recording a final album that is maybe not great but glows with an effortless, sanctified radiance. By then he was legendary in several underground ways, a post-punk icon obsessed with rabbinical inclinations and untamed guitars, though to my mind his signal achievement was writing the best book of poetry every authored by a rock star. “Self-Portrait at 28” is a beautiful ode to the sweet, ironic transience of Wordsworthian hipsterdom, while We are ranking the great shipwrecks is a line worthy of a forearm tattoo. Sure, there are better-known competitors for the title, from Jim Morrison (please) to Patti Smith (A for effort) to Leonard Cohen (for heaven’s sake) to the host of chucklehead celebrity popstars and whatnot with their stray collections of semi-coherent verse, pet marvels of awfulness. To be honest I don’t understand why, if you are rich and famous—like Drake or Meghan Fox—you want to slum around in Poetry Land. It’s a weird neighborhood and a bad job and the status is as dubious as it is anachronistic. We denizens can take solace in their projected magnification of our worth, I suppose, but we need not accept these annoyingly arrogant trespassers at face value. I am not a barber even if I sometimes trim my own beard. My wife is not a singer even if I once took a video of her at karaoke night that she has long sought to destroy. Shooting a few hoops in the driveway does not make you a basketball player—Michael Jordan is a basketball player. Meghan Fox is a movie star. Eddie Perreira was my barber until he retired at eighty-two to move in with his daughter in Port Charlotte, and even though the world races madly past every mile-marker of our grief I still miss him, as I miss David Berman, a poet and a rock star, which was not enough to save him.

Ever since I learned about sea-level rise
I’ve been binge-watching the Atlantic Ocean
but nothing ever really happens. It goes up,
it goes down. Sometimes high tide
floods a section of the city, which is nice
for the street-sweepers and canoeists.

I am so used to thinking about myself
that it’s hard to understand the sea.
What use is singularity in imagining that
seamless, quicksilver commonwealth?

The ocean is liquid, like the mind, elastic
tides of consciousness flowing and probing,
interrogating whatever seeks to contain it.

Ice is like the body, scarred and fractured,
ordained to crack, diminish, melt away.

And the third form—fog on a window,
ghostly mist, the clouds
which adorn the sky in celestial vestments
we glimpse as gaudy rags at sunset—
what could it be but the soul?

We are liquid and we are solid, oceanic
matter cloaked in the garment of being.

As for the ocean: she is coming to collect us
and gather us back into herself, as when,
long ago, your mother picked you up early
from the nurse’s office at school,
and gave you a kiss, and put you to bed,
where you slept without a care in the world.