poetry 1: that the science of cartography is limited
Every April, I celebrate national poetry month with a poem each day here at 37days. I hope you will enjoy this frolic through metaphor even half as much as I do. I know, I know. At least half of you are moaning. "I hate poetry," you're saying to yourself. "I never understand it."
I don't understand how the internet works either, not really. Or the telephone. Or voice mail. Or self-rising flour. Or Congress. Or wireless plans. I don't know how my brain or pancreas work, for that matter. But I use them. Daily. Somehow.
Maybe understanding is overrated. I think it is. Instead, just for this one month, just read the words aloud. The language we speak is gorgeous, even when it is not. Speak them in Scottish or Irish accents if that helps. It never hurts.
Poets point us to images we dare not speak aloud, and yet they speak them.
Words are words are rivers. Read aloud these jumbles of syllables without making sense of them, for once. Give up the morning news for a morning poem. Just for now. You can go back to people killing each other over nothing in a month. They'll still be doing it, but you'll be fuller, richer, wiser, perhaps more serene in the face of it. Your vocabulary may be deeper in sheer nuance, in the miraculous juxtaposition of this and not-this.
Come. Shall we begin our Poemapalooza?
That the Science of Cartography Is Limited
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
