Map Time
A continent’s worth of days.
The ravine where the cartographer
left his bones. X.
Legend has it.
He said: Let an inch equal 50 miles.
And it was.
When the town closes its eyes,
it dissolves into prairie.
Prairie has it.
It’s better to assume there’s no way to know
where you are.
The mountain knows.
Look where that got him.
Thought
This poem evolved from the notion of space (a map of a continent, for example) acquiring qualities or units of time (days). After this start, map elements, such as the X marking a spot, the legend, and the scale morphed in interesting ways. A fun poem that wrote itself.
8 Poems (2021). Unfortunately, 8poems.com is no longer publishing poetry on or off the Internet.
