A Million Little Edens 

Walk with me, friend, through the red waste 

land of our Saturn. 

Let me tell you a story by way of answering your questions. One where a million little Edens 

still bring color to my eyes, 

until they fade again. 

This is not mere cataracts, friend. 

It’s the remembering that’s getting harder, 

not the seeing. 

But for a story, all I need is a voice, 

a song I’ve held at bay for far too long, 

for I’m far too old for reluctance. 

Back on Earth, 

the one wrapped in green, 

there’s the Eden that lives in the eyes of the beholder: beating engines, breeding steam, 

a Neo New Orleans built to towering atop the waterlogged corpse of a ramshackle giant – once the bootleg French capital of a newborn Enlightenment’s 

overseas escapade. 

But this is not that city. 

This city’s raised highway is mounted 

on the braised backbone of that placated prodigal son. And the skyline does still follow the path 

of that once Mighty Mississippi. And they do baptize it new every spring when the ice melts. 

But then, there is the greater difference:

the bayou caked in snow, floury and crumbling by February, yet the rain-turned-snow falling 

still – beating in from the sea far below, the winds only growing with altitude – past the half-shouldered flood walls of the old city, razing concrete and steel in the third millennium 

numbered in centuries instead of eons, 

where winter’s hands still stroke the central wetland 

and nature and man once made their final stands. 

We would not have made it out alive, friend. 

We would have sunk into that bayou like the island, 

once a volcano, 

sinks back into the sea again, 

though they call it ocean there, 

and some call it the second Eden. 

It’s the one with the white-hot sun, the air on fire, 

thick with wanting – a haunting humidity. 

And then there’s the chanting. 

Because this is not just any volcanic island. 

It starts as the moon rises 

and goes on till it sets – on the water, always on the water – with its spluttery dip, 

never seeming to move yet vanishing 

by sunrise all the same. 

Can you hear it? 

Oh, of course you can. 

The same way the wind is all you can hear on Saturn.

They’ll tell you it’s just the space air. 

Don’t believe them. 

They’re weasels in kitten’s clothing. 

But their music, oh their music, it’s just to die for. You’re new, but you’ll learn when to listen. 

Until you do, we’ll have a seat right here. 

And then you’ll stay for lunch. 

And midday tea. 

And then there’s the dinner to prepare for and – oh dear. Is that the time? 

You know how scatty I can be. 

It’s almost sunset, and soon you’ll know what happens then. It’s rare here, and there’s always one moon 

or another domineering the sky. 

So, a true nocturne is all the more special. 

We’ll go for a stroll. 

It’ll give us more time for your questions. 

There’s a path right along the red-wind ocean. They call it Third Eden. 

Charming, right? 

Like one of those eight wonders? 

Brighter though, 

colorful. 

They say it’s haunted. 

But not the kind of haunting that counts. 

And then, you know how they can be. 

But anyway. 

You came here for a story.

You’ll end up singing for a year from a throat dipped in honey, the way they used to do in Paris, when the war was on 

and half the population had nothing to do but sing and sway and turn their faces skyward at the sound of bomber planes. 

A fourth Eden trapped in time, 

wrapped like one of those mummies 

in one of those old motion pictures they liked to watch. 

They’d lost their colonies by then. 

Some said they were never theirs to begin with. 

Others said it was all French in the beginning, 

before the fall. 

None of them talked about the ocean in those days. 

It was a sore subject, what with the flooding 

and the whispers of artificial ice. 

Venice was already gone – 

the ice caps, too – though no one talked about them much. 

Hard to talk about a place without a proper name. 

Easier to forget about it, too. 

But they were not content with that. 

That’s when they started building up – into the clouds and then the sky: towers of iron, steel, whatever 

would hold the weight of their swaying. 

They carved huge windows into the walls 

so they could see the stratosphere, 

because there was nothing else to look at, 

all the while reminiscing about the more beautiful times 

as the Alps melted 

and Everest turned to a pile of dirt-blackened mush. 

I’m afraid we overcompensated, friend,

and they’re both solid to the touch now – like well-blown glass. Pretty, in a deadly sort of way. 

Though they didn’t like to see the lovely in it then. 

Instead, they wrote of mountains blue as sky, green as grass – have you heard of grass? 

They liked it because it was green – like summer, like oak trees, or maybe it was birch. 

Because it smelled like a fifth Eden – 

whatever Eden smells like. 

You know how it can get, 

all foggy… 

I’m there one second – and the next, here, 

and there, but a different there, 

a different then – 

No, the same then – 

with the singing and the 

swaying and the green and 

blue and birch trees. 

But then, they liked the other colors, too: 

Painted portraits 

of fresh, white lilies on antique tables; fields of orange stalks along the backs of storm-ridged mountains; silver ponds lit by unseen moons. 

I’ve seen a hundred moons. 

But none can hold a candle to that one. 

Our Moon. 

Now that,

that was Eden. 

What number are we on? 

I’m afraid I can’t recall. 

Would you humor me a moment? 

I think it’s coming back now: The last rays of a winter moon, tucking children into bed long after sunset, waking them to still-dark rooms that smelled of incense, myrrh. 

We held each other then, you know – 

held our single breath for the coming winter. Though there was no fear of cold in it, or, at least, no fear of anything past frostbite. We didn’t tuck ourselves away at the slightest chill or cower from the quivering brush of snowflakes, 

and insults were more fire- than ice-centric. 

But we were different then. 

Perhaps not braver, just afraid in different ways. 

I’m sorry you couldn’t see it. I hate to keep a secret. 

You know this. And I’m really trying not to keep it. It’s just not so easy explaining snow angels to a sapling Saturn-dweller 

asking questions about Eden. 

I confess, most of my numbering is arbitrary, 

reaching for meaning rather than substance. 

There are millions more, as promised, but only limited time with which to tell, 

and perhaps you’d prefer a ghost story. 

Yes? 

It’s just as well. 

Stories of Edens are stories of ghosts.

Because somewhere, 

in a long-lost nightmare, 

borne in a distant time, 

in a city that was not yet a city, 

before the French came and the trees fell and the ocean learned to swallow debris each time it rained too loudly, 

there stood a copse of unabashed oak trees. 

They swayed. How they swayed. 

And when floods came, 

they drowned and died and shed their soon-to-be Spanish moss and joined the ocean and the nameless river in their corpsed state. And atop them, there was built a city. 

Not a new city, an older one. 

Older than boats other than canoes. Older than travelers witnessing foreign sunsets. Older even than many of the as-yet nameless mountains. 

And soon, very soon, the city that was not a city was erected from those trees, and tables were made and stacked with goods, 

and the harbor was seen by human eyes, 

and they were human. 

And they, too, had to deal with drowning: first in flood water 

and then in blood 

the very same color as their own. 

So, the city was built upon again, 

this time by sea-borne hands, 

though the sea did not endorse them. 

And the city was given a name 

and baptized for the first time, 

and its peoples were shoved together

and apart 

and together again. 

And we all know what happens next, as well we should. A city built atop a hill cannot be hidden, 

but the one beneath the sea will ever battle to be seen. And perhaps – perhaps – despite how it has grown in all these centuries, all these eons – 

stacking atop itself in pieces, like bodies in a mausoleum – it will learn to be our living grave again. 

And until then, 

perhaps 

it can also be our Eden. 

But it can only be our Eden. 

Because this is not that city. 

This will never be that city.