The Cartographer’s Dream
I
There is no map for where we’ll go. I’m talking to G-d again. & he’s listening—& I’ve taken to listening to Coltrane & Tupac. & I’m not listening to the music. I’m listening to voices telling me “all you got is these fucking poems, & a kiss in a room you’ll never see again.” & I’m saying to walk away is to hold my daughters & find a way to breathe like I did when I kissed you. But I’m talking to G-d—& he’s listening. & now it’s not about me, & I’m saying I’m walking from you, saying that we’re walking from each other, & saying it all makes sense, & there are these dice rattling in my head, & even G-d tells me, “Let me know how that goes.”
II
In sleep, discovery: you are the map. The lines & curves of your body: direction. Men fail by believing palm calluses are more than a way to know what they touch, more than distraction for the palm reader seeing their torches. I fail in expecting to find a history to get us where we dream, when we are that history; when the map of your body points to all that will relieve my desert years. I imagine my scars. The cartographer wants to make a representation of reality with his hands, & I have tried: shifted words & phrases, & even my own bland movements into a kind of shadow choreography of you. I have failed, too. Traded wilderness for labyrinth: the cartographer must touch completely, to know, even some longing.
III
To know the map. & to know the map is to trace its topography. To worship the asymmetrical, bless scar & curve with touch. The earliest known map was the invention of two people: a man lost, a woman wanting him to find himself in the shadows that formed when she turned this way, turned that way. No, the woman was lost, & the man wanted her to find herself in his shadows. No, both were lost. There were two maps. Two people buried in each other’s funk & fever. All stories end in discovery. In the dream, the cartographer’s mind is a cave. You & your map are one. To know you, he must know your map. Must bury face in spring water, taste hills, run hands over bones & knots of worry. Few will travel this journey. The cartographer & you carry so many maps in your minds that there is risk: to get lost in a past journey. Every cartographer confronts this: legacies of mis-drawn valleys, the failed explorations. Before you own this one, you must believe you were invented for it. To know the map, you must believe this map starts the palimpsest that will be your life.
IV
To want a map is to want narrative. It is to be human. The cartographer understands there is no place on his map for the North Star—and yet, he knows the North Star will guide him home. In that way, the map is the North Star. Why in memory my fingers play in your hair, long & kinky; & in fact, I am nine hundred miles away. No map worth owning is without two poles: paraphrase for regions not understood. The cartographer knows the map has reasons. The map is reasons. Why the traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge calms & excites me. It is redundant with excess. How can the map be you & you be the map, & you have no idea how my hands tremble? The cartographer wants to invest himself in narrative, in discovery. He sees with his hands, & I want to be like the cartographer—but to see you, I must close my eyes, still my hands, & imagine both time machine & parallel universe. The cartographer knows parallel universes, creates them with each new map he draws.
V
To have an answer: If you are the map & the landscape, who is your author? What will you do with my tools? This ruler & protractor looking to translate the complexity of your body into a topography I can understand. You are a cool breeze transforming a fall day into want. The cartographer has no whims. This map that is you, I will trace & make into a collage of details. Invent anew brilliance & beauty mark. The cartographer always has an agenda. The first map is of the ancient Anatolian city of Çatalhöyük drawn on a wall for a woman, drawn to remind her, always, of where he will be. To map without caution. To notice laughter as if it comes from the valley. To pretend a smile is gateway to a secret garden. In the end, the cartographer craves what G-d has: knowledge not only of how things will end, but how they will start, & where, any, footstep will lead.
VI
Of the map. The cartographer is lost in its topography, lost in gradation & texture. It is a crude process. Mapmaking. Conjecture & longing. Carving alabaster with a toothpick. In time your eyes become the world, which is to say everyone sees what you see. To love like the mapmaker is what I desire. I hunger for that ability, to choose between the dam & the river. The mapmaker knows what he does is art. A way to talk to G-d shouts & hushed tones. He knows it is only as scientific as a hand on thigh. He knows there is no periodic table to track the unraveling he controls. Master carpenter of longitude & latitude, the cartographer never needs doorframe, as if voice & desire is always an opening. Such devotion & skill inspires conceit, makes man a bastard to whim.
VII
Think of the Persian rugmaker weaving imperfection into his craft as homage to G-d, as a way to say only G-d is perfect. The mapmaker works a similar illusion, masking perfection with flaw. He mislabels a corner, a small unnoticeable place to ensure you know the map is his. When a man is in love with a woman he does this: reveals a flaw to only her. Mapmaker, Rugweaver & I all share the same flaw, letting an imperfection become avalanche until it is all that is noticeable.
VIII
Always the cartographer learns to hate the map. Overwhelmed by the belief that he controls the possibility, he succumbs to anger. Then he succumbs to madness. If you are the map, you are what inspires this rage. To be the mapmaker is my folly, to believe that there is an ending created with lines & angles is the insanity of man wanting the world to make too much sense. Selection shapes and ruins a map. The cartographer believes that if one is lost, one should get more lost. The cartographer practices an art that demands he lose himself. He is the only true lover on this planet.
IX
There is a word for this: cacoethes. The mapmaker comes to know that his art is as much lie as prophecy, knows that what he sees is not always what line & angle create on scoured leaf. To make a map is to capture the zeitgeist of an afternoon in Pittsburgh. There are things the cartographer will not admit. The more beautiful the map, the more you should distrust it. I have fallen down a thousand wells for you. Tell me what I trust more? Tell me that every cartographer doesn’t let the map know it’s most intimate secrets. You are not the map. You are my woman and not my woman. The mapmaker imagines that he needs not be forgiven for wanting to capture the piece of himself missing. I am like that. Grizzled, cartographer—singing.
