The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion - by
an extract
/
/ i. in which the cartographer explains himself
/
/ You might say
/ my job is not
/ to lose myself exactly
/ but to…
an extract
/
/ i. in which the cartographer explains himself
/
/ You might say
/ my job is not
/ to lose myself exactly
/ but to…
Like tweed like pearls
/ like fire like wood
/ like loss like Listen with Mother with me
/
/ Like prayer like water
/ like a Scots laird’s…
i.m. Les Powici
/
/ Britten’s Pond, a July dusk
/ mayflies hazing the flat, brown water
/ as the day’s last rooks flowed into the trees
/ and…
It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world.
/ Art for me is not an end in…
Div slugs ken thay ar universally reviled?
/ div thair mithers warn thaim,
/ kep awa frae the beer
/ an that it’s nae trui fit…
sitting in The Scotia
/ after John McGarrigle who-
/ was-killed-in-The Clutha’s funeral,
/ wolfing
/ triangular tuna sandwiches
/ and listening to someone singing
/ We Shall Overcome
/ into a feedback microphone,…
They’re peripheral to the story
/ grotesque beside the beautiful Prince and Princess
/ or the Snow Queen in her white sleigh
/
/ and even the…
I want an item without associations,
/ something clean of history, so
/ it can’t be the dust-pan, at least fifty
/ years old and tattooed…
In my father’s old bait and tackle shop
/ giant fish dangle from hooks near the men
/ grinning from ear to…
‘…that which is absent from maps is as much a proper field
/ for enquiry as that which is present’
/ J. B.
Don’t let it bring you down.
/ It’s not the smoke
/ from funeral pyres,
/ not crematorium deposit
/ on childhood games,
/ not…
Nearly all the names and numbers
/ in her leatherette phone book
/ are crossed or scribbled out.
/
/ One of these days I’ll dial
/ a dead…