[poetry] not to scale

[byblythe]

1.
I think in maps. Landscapes, pictures. Diagrams.
Easily remembered and constructed; simple
to conquer. Words practice guerilla warfare;
words sneak up and garotte ideas.
Words must be picked off in small bands.

Cartographic ideas surrender together;
whole battalions on their knees. Language is the problem.

2.
I am kept awake by alternate projections;
the globe translates in many ways. Land masses
are not constant on a flat surface.
Mercatorial distorts scale at the poles;
emphasises extremes, beginnings, the southern lands.
Azimuthal; the birds-eye for pilots,
eye-of-god narrating the continents.

I invent my own projections.
Flat plains of skin become discrete properties,
owned and named and cultivated.
River valleys flow like the creases behind your knees.

3.
Babel was never more than a small tribe of foragers
yet we speak the same language
(we, you, you are my tribe).
More important: we know the same words.
We feel them translate into touch and blood and shiver.

4.
i need to hear more words, i need to cut them from atlases
i need the same word from different maps
rolling from tongues in faraway lands; i need to be
stomach-punched by words,
i need words to lick my teeth
i need words to circle grasp and hold my wrists.

5.
Dialect geography creates isoclines;
weather bars of glottal stops over cities,
shifting pronounciation limited only by oceans and mountains.
I have tried a dugout canoe,
an outrigger propelled by barkcloth sails,
now a catamaran, capable of circumnavigation,
to paddle, to sail, to explore: to conquer maps and words.

6.
Brutality or trade are the tools of a coloniser.
I have beads and blankets and shotguns and smallpox and televisions
for you.
Just sign here (and here)
on my treaty of imagination.

7.
In proposing this pact I lose my sovereignty.
My gained territory is unfamiliar, it must be charted to be owned.
Until then it owns me.
I will learn pidgin and language and dialect,
and translate my own map.

8.
Here, roses do not substitute for hibiscus.
Woodlands are not wet with Jurassic ferns.

The path to the new land is against the wind.