The Perils of Cartography This sheet of our world Omits rocks and hills, the town appears as a grid interrupted, squiggly roads fade away into something unknown- a park, a badland, a granite cliff at the base of a mountain? The mapmaker, from afar, charts this foreign territory But I’ve no use for symbols with life so close at hand. I know which way is north without the compass rose. The map doesn’t show the patient stone work at our front gate, or the neighbor’s languid tulips at midday. The rhythm of children skipping after supper, on the street, Or the rolling thunder of skateboarders down the big hill. The way the dense conifers compost the noise of town Or the sun and its dappled light through the apple tree, How the house shades the deck from the scorch of the afternoon, the ever-moderate temperature of the kitchen, rooted too far in the earth to be so impacted by air. The white plum blossoms, dancing wildly to avoid the May hail And the way the sky fills up with purple while beyond the mountains, the sun burns itself out for another day. The toiling cartographer is unaware of how the glacier-fed lake transforms us when we plunge in, And then narrows itself into a river, off the left edge of our porch. The river- that slow moving deep animal that carries our dreams and deposits them downstream for us to collect on an autumn paddle some years later. The street grid abruptly stops on the map, giving no hint of mountains except to the cartographer Who understands the magnitude of the natural barrier Yet distance renders him oblivious to this real place.