Power
Power
Downtown, China and America meet.
Imagine the catering.
The bullet-bright carafes of coffee.
The scalloped medallions of butter.
The linen napkins unfolded upon laps.
The satisfyingly hefty cutlery.
Between carefully chosen words,
The food goes down into the stomach-engines
Where it powers power.
Imagine too the anxiousness of aides.
The flint-and-steel sound of high heels
Sparking across the marble foyer.
Imagine the security guards
With creased pictures of daughters in their wallets,
Prepared to die to protect power.
Imagine the translators
Straddling the contested border
Between languages —
They alone know what is lost.
Imagine the bathrooms,
The piped-in music,
The glances in the mirror
As each hand washes the other.
Outside, the capitalism camps have been cleared
So that the poverty that is
The tail side of the coin
(power is always heads)
Keeps to the pie charts and bar graphs.
Men who’ve been coached
On how hard to squeeze
Shake hands,
Which is why, elsewhere,
Hands shake.