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Upon Reading in the Newspaper That a Man in Vermont Was Arrested for Stealing 1,300 Maps from Libraries Around the World
For John Wood
Above his head, he feels the air stir
like a rustling of huge extinct birds
that certainly still exist on some far-
off island beneath the calligraphy
letters Here There Be Dragons on a map
some unremembered prince tacked
above his bed more than six hundred
years ago. Using the same hand
that once caressed the hard, pure thighs
of Pentecostal girls, this cartography
thief fingers longitudinal lines—
umbilical cords—to places whose very
names are smoke wisps over the sandbank
of his life. Scythes Nomades. Hispaniola.
Orbellando. Franklinia. The Tartarian Sea.
When the small bud of cancer began
to bloom in his chest, he surrendered
the idea that Heaven’s where God puts
us back together again—who would believe
that when there’s an island named
Coriolanus where a two-mile cliff spills
debris onto a pink sand beach, or a Titan-
gouged recess called the Olduvai Gorge
where famous Leakeys unearthed prehistoric
skulls that looked decidedly reptilian.
“I am a function of my blood and muscle,”
the crook confessed after being nabbed with
a $4,000 celestial map from the golden age
of Dutch cartography, the Solis Circa Orbem
Terrarum Revolutio, tucked inside his T-shirt
where, he hoped, he could feast like a czar
on the full alphabet of longing through osmosis,
through the stripes and curves of distant
overlapping rock, where life is anything but
a feathered mystery and every raven’s wing
is touched softly with starlight, angel powder.
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