Map of a Cow
It should have been easy to travel from the east
gate to the west, but I have a dark northern mind
and drifted towards the early afternoon twilight.
The path lost its bearings somewhere between
the Glasshouse, the Arboretum and the Chinese
Hillside, and soon had become a field as vast
as a football pitch, eerily floodlit, with one
dappled cow munching on the centre circle.
I saw at once the cow was my way out of there.
Its left flank had a blob shaped something like
Romania, detailed intersectional bus routes
from town to town, alleyways which promised
both danger and no regrets, a region where
only Torlakian was spoken. For the first time
in my life, I made a travel plan: booked hotels,
reserved seats on empty train carriages, filled
Tupperware boxes with salad and dull lumps
of gammon. No roast beef though. I named
the cow Pat, spilled fresh water in its trough,
and left, not stopping to question what a cow
was doing in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens,
or how I emerged after only fiften days on
Brandon Street and ordered a cappuccino
and pain au raisin from the Blue Bear Café.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2023. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor for 2023 was Aoife Lyall.
Editor’s Comments:
Adventure awaits you! The single stanza structure of this poem supports and enhances its speed and strangeness. The reader, deliberately disorientated at the beginning “It should have been easy to travel from the east / gate to the west, but I have a dark northern mind” is told “the path lost its bearings” and from there, is plunged into a riot of adventure: “a cow munching on a centre circle” flanked with a mapped-out geographical blob conveying in-depth instructions and inspiration for travel. The speaker and reader emerge dazed, bewildered, and ready for more. This is a poem that can be unpicked and enjoyed line by line, or raced through in a heady rush of spectacle and fun. Either way, read on!
Author’s Comments:
I had been wandering in the botanic gardens a few weeks before writing this poem. I hadn’t got lost there, but I do make a habit of getting lost in strange cities, and the surreal landscape of the poem – the gardens, and yet also not the gardens – represents the confusion I have often felt. The charge on my phone always seems to run out on these occasions, leaving me without recourse to Google Maps. I’m not sure why Torlakian occurred to me, but a southern Slavic dialect felt appropriately unfamiliar. I like cows and suspect they’d want to be helpful to other creatures, even humans, if they were capable of having such emotions. I didn’t want anything too spectacular happening at the end. The entire poem is meant to convey a common, everyday experience of the contemporary world.
