Xerxes Moves His Palace

Last month my father was assasinated.

The court descended here, to a lowland

plain wiped clean where floods receded,

their new king like green leaven risen

from shrubs in a muddy wash.

Most days I sit silently with my son in the heat.

My bodyguards mock me behind my back.

My architect, a peasant living beyond his means

in heaven of king’s favor, scratched out lineaments

of my new palace on the tile next to my shoe:

here, I lift that shoe, hidden in my cloak,

vain god among slaves. God lost the war.

But lives.

New candles around the courtyard,

tight wicks charred and cut.

Baskets of tinder set out each evening.

In a high-topped hat I light one

to spend the night with me:

last night a long yellow one studded

with stone chips that charred and dropped.

That taper’s honey smell, beeswax sheet

rolled around a string, leaked through

the canopy and woke me:

stones were dripping into a saucer all night.

I was dreaming of god dead in a secret room.

A new king has no counsel: my people

would hear and think I was drunk. So there.

Tonight, drunk anyway, swaying like a bettor,

I walk the pier with slaves, a jug against my thigh,

get dizzy tracking torch light twice,

once close by on the jetty walls,

and out there, juggled by trapped waves,

broken into yellow shards like shells

floating over green water.

You know me? I bridged the Hellespont,

knotted together three hundred ships.

We walked across the Adriatic deck to deck.

The ocean was pissed. I lashed it, branded it,

it boiled beneath my whip like eggs in a bowl.

I’m taking a chance. I have all this time to regret.

My son watches shadows creep beneath us,

and if he can stay still long enough, looks hard,

he says the sun moves our black shapes.

The day begins to nod. The boy goes off to school.

He is learning to ride horses and to tell the truth.