A Draft to Look At (05-06?)

The ruling elites needed to re-route the rivers.
Strange nations became acquainted with another.
Now the Yellow River poured into the Rhine
and the Orinoco looped into the Hudson
as the Nile poured in the Colorado, and the Mekong
merged with the Fore. Still the elites were sad
and their crystal balls cloudy, and their statistics
communicated messages at cross-purposes–
the sludgy backwash pouring from a culvert
marbled like chunks of quartz in granite
spills back into the Gulf that was its source.
They reconverted all the rivers and their sources
but don’t apologize: so the Orinoco croc
caught in the snow won’t catch his meal
but will be a dinosaur. Already hockey teams
play in the Sun Belt. Trust what creeps
can crawl and find its way. Exceptions linger.
The planners of the world refuse to think
what the world would be like if left alone
but neither do they like retrospection:
what’s done is done. Can we move on?

How the routes of the world were changed.
So that cheap appliances arrived in Beijing,
coffee flowed to Colombia, medical instruments
glutted Germany and fighter jets Sweden.
Tiger fish followed the Connecticut, crocs swam
the Hudson, and orangutangs found themselves
amazed among Florida orange groves, and lemurs
among the Dakotas, and arctic foxes in casino dumpsters,
while the Congolese great apes gamboled among the rhubarbs.

In other climes locals shot anything that moved,
and whatever moved moved rapidly as the eye
could sort woods from the intruder, trees from woods,
until they could enumerate each leaf and the lobe on the leaf,
after which a dissatisfaction would rise in the gullet,
an acidic taste at the back of the throat, and the viewer
wished to rearrange the lobes on each leaf,
and the leaves on each tree and each tree in the woods.
Such imbalanced views cried out for rearrangement.

In strange ways came together tributaries,
as if hands of different sizes were laced together.
Not like compatible male and compatible female,
hands of Barbie and Ken, Napoleon and Josephine.
Piranha gorged bottom-feeders, penguins enveloped
in the barely visible umbrellas of jellyfish.
Hybrids popped their heads from the waves.
But for the think-tanks, business boomed.
The therapy of re-routing the world had just begun,
the cutting up of maps again and rearranging them.
Think of all the readjustments needed:
already psychotherapy booms. Come stand in line with us.