It's not that we're not dying
Everything is dying.
We hear these rumors of the planet's end
none of us will be around to watch.

It's not that we're not ugly.
we're ugly.
Look at your feet, now that your shoes are off.
You could be a duck,

no, duck-billed platypus,
your feet distraction from your ugly nose.
It's not that we're not traveling,
we're traveling.

But it's not the broadback Mediterranean
carrying us against the world's current.
It's the imagined sea, imagined street,
the winged breakers, the waters we confuse with sky

willingly, so someone out there asks
are you flying or swimming?
That someone envies mortal happiness.
like everyone the other side, the dead

who stand in watch, who would give up their bliss,
their low tide eternity rippleless
for one day back here, alive again with us.
They know the sea and sky I'm walking on

or swimming, flying, they know it's none of these,
this dancing-standing-still, this turning, turning,
these constant transformations of the wind
I can bring down by singing to myself,

the newborn mornings, these continuals-


About this poem
"I'm weary of the poet-prophets who proclaim what we already know: that we have made a mess of planet earth. I am enough of a romantic to believe that imagination, conceiving of our present and future situation in image and metaphor, may be our first step toward the possibility of change in rethinking national policies."
-Peter Cooley

About Peter Cooley
Peter Cooley's most recent book is "Night Bus to the Afterlife" (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014). He is the senior Mellon professor in the humanities and director of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in New Orleans.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Peter Cooley. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate