A Certain Cartography Leads Me

A Certain Cartography Leads Me

These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger

like women feeling for the smoothness of yarn-goods.

                                                                                                Elizabeth Bishop

                                                                                                The Map

Once or twice maybe though certainly never more than half

a dozen times I’ve been out of sight of dry

land.  I floated out slow and when the motor was cut

we drifted near the buoy we’d hook to pull up

and wrap and wrap it round the line hauler and watch
while the water was squeezed through to drop, like the water is

often dropped, back down onto itself, first maybe

striking the gunwales, the scratched fiberglass.  One day

it was aqua so far from shore I’m not sure how I missed

the trail we made in foam and oil and while I’ve never been
any good at mixing colors on a palate to get the effect Edgar Degas

may have gotten, my preference these days, 

because he seems to tell my story honestly, is Andrew
Wyeth.  It’s in the color of his boats and bait sheds and his brick

lighthouses.  It’s his distensible attention to the texture

of fog, and sounding into it to risk the cliché I feel

that exquisite chill at being deep

in the middle of it without boundary without land-

fall, without that need to say inside (because knowing

doesn’t need word, word being that kind of explanation,

of needing convincing)(and it goes without saying that
with all these letters coming together like they do, you must
know I’m not entirely convinced) my head: I’m in

control.   I’m in control of all of this. If I wanted I could

step off this boat and walk back

to shore, my binnacle glass unmolested, my eye

peeking into watch the compass clutch 

her cantilevers, the precision of the gift only John

Harrison delivered up to the horological society

when he discovered longitude could be, must be

measured if men were ever going to make it close

to home.  And while I go out mostly in my own head now,

and the distance from my left ear to my right

is only about seven inches, if that, I ask, should I want

to plot it out from the cove I set out into

maybe it would stretch, the tape I use is the same

one my mother used, measuring me once

from heal to crotch naked and ashamed while she wrote

and complained, the tracing paper fluttering in the open
window, I might make it to Digby, Nova Scotia (depending on

the map) though truth be told I’d like to get to Great

Village, where Elizabeth Bishop came as a little girl,

before she was stolen back to Massachusetts.  I remember

that was after they’d taken her mother away, somehow

in her grief a scream ripped clean through the middle

(who could tell, it was, after all, like thought, always

on the inside) the rupture of her undoing 

a knife plunge in the dividing halfs of the brain, staying

there forever, so all her daughter’s thoughts had to

navigate around it, the buoy, chained to the bottom

of the ocean floor, tipping-ringing-groaning-all the wind

all the snow all the coming and going split

the way only water can split, cupped for a moment

but entirely ungraspable, even (and only in the coldest

months can this be done with salt water) the sea

and my fragile as silica prow, motoring ahead

these few, twice maybe, half a dozen times at best,

away from, eventually, unseeable land.