"A Map Is A Lie"

In honor of National Poetry Month, I will be posting work by myself each Friday. This is a new piece about the idea that, despite what we may think and perceive, there are no clear dividing lines, no real boundaries in this world.

A Map Is A Lie

The simple blue crease like a vein on the skin of the ground
scribes the course of water, stark against the white of the paper,
but my foot sinks to the ankle in a slurry of mud and green slime.
Water covers the bottom third of soggy tree trunks,
pools of algae swirled into larger pools of decay clinging to bark.
The map can’t show how the winter storms exhaled oceans of water to recarve and swell
the path, and the map can’t describe the spot where the armored crayfish
wandered from its world into ours, the world of the map, where it stood on the road
(shown as a black scratch labelled “Fire Access”), frozen in valiant battle pose,
holding claws aloft against me, to repel and frighten the unfathomable giant,
but is now a crunched red stain on asphalt, smeared by unfathomable tires.
The map can’t show it was foolish or driven or careless or simply too adventurous
for its kind, just an unlucky explorer. The map can only incise
a sharp line between elements, blue water-white ground-black road,
the cartographer’s need to paralyze a living breathing shifting mantle,
a fixed idea pinned in shape and place, a lie.
It can’t show the mutable spongey zone of neither earth nor water,
the permeable membranes, everything flowing between states,
the crayfish, me, you, from one side to the other.

©JEF 2024