On the wall of the commune’s living room
someone’s pasted all the topographic maps
for the entire area, connected them carefully
and made sure that every contour line
matches its continuation on the next map.

Over time, you’ve put a pin into every place
you’ve been where something happened. You
define that broadly — place of the first
owl, the first slimemold, the orange shine
of the last place you fell and laughed about it

instead of cursing the ground itself for its treachery.
Red means good here, blue means bad, and everything
is based in silver sharp and true that leaves holes in the map
where you think you saw something meaningful once.
It’s not like there’s blood in there —

oh, there’s something seeping up from within,
but it’s clear. It’s like plasma —
there are things floating in it you can’t see, things
critical to life that are carried through you without you knowing
exactly where anything is at a given moment.

You are here. Here is
some mall, some array of
food courts and petty mayhem. You are
the man staring at the glass map
which is telling you that you are here,
but of course you knew that.

You imagine that the mall’s
on someone else’s map, a map
sitting on a lap in a Toyota
inching toward the place you are.
The Toyota’s slowing down and the driver
pitches a butt out the window to snuff it.

Heat gives way to snow-soaked cold just as
you’re losing your own fire to move —
where the hell is the bookstore in this place,
and now that you see how far it is
from here to there, do you really need
to read anything more
than you’ve already read?
Maybe you’re only here to be the vessel of frustration
for the ambiguity of red dots and yellow blocks
that promise destination, and another book
would just complicate matters.

Instead, you wish you were in
your own car and that you were passing that Toyota
going the other way, away from
your current location which is still
the place you were a minute ago.
Which way is the parking garage? You sink
back into the dots and blocks on the black glass.

You are here
and anyone who tells you
a map is not the territory is naive:
without this map would you be this antsy
that you’re not already somewhere else?
That’s a map for you: places with meaning
marked for your pleasure and convenience
with clear paths to the next place you want to be,
except that the cars on the road out there
are on different maps
and when you slump onto the hard slats
of the industrial benches before the glass
that holds you, tugged to immobility by that red dot,
you sense the number of journeys
you could be making, the number of maps
you could be looking at —
but you are here.

What was once
a mission has become
a compulsion —

I’ve stopped thinking
and feeling except in poetry,
and I am no poet, so

if You can find a way clear
to letting me go
without another word from me,

then do.