cartographilia

In which Sidney shows me wonderful uses for Google maps.

The World as Art

See sidebar for Sid's very excellent map of Connecticut.

Careless whispers of a good friend
Just what I needed at two in the morning.



(I fell for a straight girl...?)

Theories of Time and Space

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

-- Natasha Trethewey
Her book Native Guard: Poems won this year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

In my house

In my house
mice and fireflies
get along.

-- Kobayashi Issa
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto

says Ivan,

Several of Issa's poems refer to fireflies. They seem to represent a luminous aspect of the awareness, that which hovers in quiet delight in the summer night.

Mice might suggest to us that part of the mind that scurries and scratches and gets into everything -- the busy mind that loves to hear itself squeak from every corner.

What does it mean, then, for mice and fireflies to get along in Issa's house?

From Far and Away

The rain falls on.
Acres of violets unfold.
Dandelion, mayflower
Myrtle and forsythia follow.

The cardinals call to each other.
Echoes of delicate
Breath-broken whistles.

I know something now
About subject, object, verb
And about one word that fails
For lack of substance.

Now people say, He passed on
Instead of that. Unit
Of space subtracted by one.
It almost rhymes with earth.

What is a poet but a person
Who lives on the ground
Who laughs and listens

Without pretension of knowing
Anything, driven by the lyric's
Quest for rest that never
(God willing) will be found?

Concord, kitchen table, 1966.
Corbetts, Creeley, a grandmother
And me. Sweater, glasses,
One wet eye.

Lots of laughter
Before and after. Every meeting
Rhymed and fluttered into meter.
The beat was the message. . . .

-- Fanny Howe
(for Robert Creeley)

This Day
by Jimmy Santiago Baca

I feel foolish,
        like those silly robins jumping on the ditch boughs
        when I run by them.
                Those robins do not have the grand style of the red tailed hawk,
                no design, no dream, just robins acting stupid.
They've never smoked cigarettes, drank whiskey, consumed drugs
as I have.
                In their mindless
                fluttering about
                filled with nonsense,
                they tell me how they
                        love the Great Spirit,
                scold me not to be self-pitying,
                to open my life
                and make this day a bough on a tree
                leaning over infinity, where eternity flows forward
                and with day the river runs
                        carrying all that falls in it.
                Be happy Jimmy, they chirp,
                Jimmy, be silly, make this day a tree
                leaning over the river eternity
                and fuss about in its branches.

Singing louder.

Song

The lace under your shirt,
intricate as lichen,
flirts all night
with the moon's

distant interweaving that nobody
can hold
because it falls equally
on all this spring so cold

and late arriving—
twenty-five years to discover
that love still lies waiting ...
Our talk builds in the air

nothing noble or simple
but something unforeseen
in the way people
come to mean

more than any presence
in the sky's vast foyer
leading to apartments
too grand for

easy habitation:
I love the way your face
becomes the reflection
of gravity, grace, a place

to settle in when
love that passes on
to others as soon as we are gone
arrives without an invitation:

let's lay our heads down
among beams and girders
rising floor by floor
around the moon half risen.

-- Tom Sleigh