Here we go up the coast in company with floating archipelagos
borealis azure, parliaments of ice boating northwest to Canada,
lordly tourists, motherlands with hitchhikers, gulls, seals,
the occasional white bear, the world in a guise I had imagined
but did not know to be a question: If this is not your Eden,
what is?

I would require seasons, five or six, and a book of words to use
with one set of meanings, I would need pure colour
in great sweeps as well as inside and underneath where
you don’t expect it. Belief would take the form of tolerant irony,
say lapsed Quaker, lack temple priests and rules but one:
love when you can.

My Eden would run on marsh gas, on wind, be governed by those
who mean to save the world with zeal except for Texans or,
come to think of it, feminist collectives, its civic spaces
made of dance and song and public art of the impermanent kind
that announces itself by departing. My Eden would have some hot
dark nights,

insects, frogs, roosting orange birds, ripe fruit, free lunch,
stable money and hauls of harvest, fair play, invention,
clean wells, children in bed linen by open windows, and snow,
yes, now and then on the domed roofs of the capital, at the edge
of the night where the white bear swims on his back through the bright
sea of his hunt.