Sharpshooter: Thankx... I'm always looking for topo maps and this is a good collection. The nice thing about topos is that the hard rock geology rarely changes. ][<en

Topo Dreams

Old fingers wrinkled soft
slide over creases, faded folds
in morning south light of breakfast nook.
Where feet and bones no longer travel
weary, eye searches circuitry of roads.
Stumbles over gray-haired swampland
blue image of river, stream,
small lakes where a love was resealed.

Avenues, interstate route numbers
southward, ageless,
an attraction to the place,
its reflection in name.

Of what was and where it moved over
to blending of triangles of field, forest --
where we are is a distant place
yearning will never satisfy to find.

Eroded, disfigured, revamped, renamed
the earth has erased your isolate trail.
Now there are only phantom landmarks
passed down in fading glimpse.

Your grandchildren will never know
magenta light of morning beneath that pine,
scorching of that sun lost forever
in peach blossom of a wild rose.

xxx

The poem is an amalgam of several factors both personal and objective. It was composed at the emotional peak of a series of commuter flights over southwest Indiana at about 3000 feet. At the time the author was reading an historical pamphlet about George Rogers Clark, whose monument in Vincennes the author was working on. It seems that an activity of the scouts in southwest Indiana is to periodically go out and search the winter march of Mr. Clark and his brave men. The only real difficulty is that referenced landmarks to the expedition have either vanished or bodily moved. There is no consensus as to the actual historic route to the expedition as it lies on the present earth.

This local endeavor to trace the bodily motions of ancestors is echoed in the search for the Ulysses of Homer. Thus the poem renders some semblance of neoclassic propriety in subject.

It is also echoed in the personal search to understand, empathize and relive the route of a favored ancestor. In this case the surface of the poem is directly about the authors maternal grandfather. Early in his life the grandfather emigrated to Central New York State from Iowa. Previously the family had arrived as Dutch Huguenots some time prior to the revolution and then migrated northward on the Hudson, many of them buried along the way, eventually landing in Iowa as sheep farmers. Grandfather Rose was obsessed with map collecting through his whole life. A never attained goal of his was to visit all of the United States.

On another level the simple poem is a detailed reworking of a decidedly childish patchwork quilt motif. A comment upon sign, symbol and the frailty of human generation forcibly squashed in between.

The reader may wonder how all of this weight came to reside upon such a short and simple set of lines. It is an opinion of the author that the garbage polemic of reality can well exist outside of the poetic expression. The poem as objective artifact resides in itself such as a fossil of bone or shard of Native American pottery. In this the poem represents a fragment of the imaginary landscape of our dreams. Though this fragment laden attitude may be detrimental to the full appreciation of the poetic artifact, it represents the best quality of contemporary poetry. The common cultural landmarks of poetry have either moved or vanished. Where common understanding would once have resided as a natural outcome of speech, we have this individual need to paraphrase the real in a journalistic prose.

First published in The American Geographical Society’s FOCUS.

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