Cartography

Rhona McAdam
From:   Cartography. Oolichan, 2006.

However gentle the heart
that guides your hands, this love
is bruising. After nights in the savage with you
I am tender for days; for days my skin reveals
your turbulent map.

I am a traveller, at heart.
Wherever journeys lead me, there
I imagine myself living. I visit you
with the ache of travel, fold myself
into the space between your arms
and make that leap again
inhabiting, for now, these chambers
we beat against together
making doors in the heart's walls
small enough to enter
without damage.

Damage is what we're circling.
Each night
we shrink a little farther
into flesh that never
quite remembers its form. Time draws
its own path and we are riddled
by the passage of all that slips
through us; spend half our lives
growing up and the rest
unable to stay there, nights
passed with our lives slipping
beneath a lover's fingers. On these
mad highways who can ever
survive the collisions, the names
knuckling memory, their record
written soft, blue, in unforgiving
permanence, a smudge,
the dark side blooming.

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6

Rhona McAdam's works copyright © to the author.