CARTOGRAPHER's FOLLY
He pens a perfect map - but is it his,
this transcript of a landscape, mountains, fields
and cliff-top walkway shadowing the shore?
It's nearly finished ... one more line ... he draws
a small imaginary pond, concealed
within a master-plan of how it is.

If someone copies his life's diagram,
his bleak triangulations, muddy hours,
he's set a trap beneath a real hedge
and he will catch the poacher near the edge
of ownership. Whose is this land? Yours? Ours?
The wolf thinks it's entitled to the lamb.

His little scrap of water, his blue lie,
names him by deed as having squatter's rights
over each knoll, lake, foothill, contour, cirque -
and that's enough. He smiles, rolls up his work,
then goes outside and looks up at the night
tracing a star-bear on the Northern sky.

CARTOGRAPHER
A globe floats in his mind, a blue balloon
with collage shapes of land and snowy caps.
He pats it with a thought, it drifts away
beyond the prick of pens. He smiles - perhaps
he'll draw it like a dream of ancient maps;
winds with puffed cheeks, sea-monsters, bare-faced moon.

The ink and pen project his world and chart
his hurricanes, deep fears and rising tides,
white soaring peaks and hidden feet of clay.
No-one is lost and nothing falsified.
It's his life-plan and - traveller - your guide,
a flattened, sketchy atlas of the heart.


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