The most American thing about Emily Dickinson: she knows to start with her best line. For a poet who published mostly in letters and piles in the back of her mind, the hooks are so sound-byteable. (I’m Nobody! Who are you?) She’s private more than secret; nobody watching means nothing to hide. My childhood and the boom of warrantless wiretapping coincided. As a result, I believed my government to have godlike ears and eyes. I was familiar already with some of its arms, its open hands. I’m afraid that, had I been born somewhere else, I might’ve become a novelist.

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In a recurring dream I’m reading aloud in my undergraduate lecture hall when someone, a stranger, interjects, Your poetry is fascist. They produce a text replete with highlights: the lyric ‘I.’ Having grappled with this already, on waking, I’m surprised that my unconscious critic is still more concerned with perspective than breath. Boot camp is instructive on the use of cadences: units cohere in rhythm, sync footsteps. It’s ancient: Roman centurions also counted Left, right, left — sinister, dexterous — ineluctable dictation, I call success. A good line break about-facing me I experience as physical pleasure. Metrically, I’m after attention, absolute control. 

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First, a few words on the vanity of Venice. Cheap joke: it’s in the water, can’t help but self-reflect. In every building in Venice, there’s a painting or sketch of Venice, an infinite regress of Venices that, today, feels apt. It’s Wednesday; US polls have closed. It’s hard to not feel like a rat, I tell Annee, when you find yourself outside the sinking ship. We expected nail-biting; that isn’t what this is. The next four years crystallize. We go for Aperol spritzes, talk Brodsky. Annee reads out “Odysseus to Telemachus” — we snag on the flesh of water, dreams, blamelessness. 

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Another thing about Dickinson: her angular sense of time. Like any American poet, prone to self-mythologizing, reportedly she couldn’t read a clock until fifteen. (My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand.) Taken at face value: shadow was her hour hand. One year I rolled newspapers every day at 6 AM. Cylindrical, wet mornings, shoving into plastic sleeves. Every paved minute asks its own trajectory. The best would meet me curbside. Tougher customers complained I lobbed too weakly; they required thwack, dogs barking, waking up. (There is a Zone whose even Years No Solstice interrupt —) 

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Who names the operations? Paint colors used to thrill me — at the hardware store, between houses, shunning all of green, oohing synonyms for yellow, a blue called Pleat. War plans were color-coded before it got too complicated. 1942, the War Plans Division culled a dictionary for 10,000 common nouns and adjectives. Resulting combinations — two dimensions of randomness — were secure, absurd, essentially listless. Today the Pentagon crafts mini-mission statements, names designed for granite-chisel, pixel, newsprint. The shade where my parents fell in love was Operation Golden Pheasant — lakeside, a tent so muddy it would stand if you pulled the stakes out.

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It’s true, I’ve held a sleepless man. When sex wasn’t enough — not even rough, not even lashed against the posts, in practiced knots — I might’ve said, Take me there. And he opened his laptop. The album my great-grandfather sent home from Vietnam would’ve been reviewed before postage. So there’s nothing mission-sensitive: shots of the mess hall, the bookshelves, the contents of the fridge, his made bed. He wrote, So you can see how I live! No photos of the landscape. No photos with black bags over their heads. I smoothed his neck until nearly morning; once he slept, I slept.

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Noticing a new, derailing shortness of breath, I get my lungs checked. As it becomes painfully clear that this is only health anxiety, the doctor asks, too patiently, Do you have a family history of bad things happening to young people? (Dying! To be afraid of thee One must to thine Artillery Have left exposed a Friend —) Gulf War Syndrome is a chronic disorder linked to wartime exposures: burn pits, oil fires, chemical weapons, depleted uranium dust. Consequences metastasize, unexploded ordnance. In Rumsfeld’s parlance, it’s the known unknowns that scare me most; the latency. Decades between detonation and sound.