Cartographers formerly inked squares
with dragons near their peripheries
and precipices over which ships tumbled
to Hell, or rocks, or seas
never known before.
And quack chiropractors with pricking needles
tattoo courses: their phony kinesiology
tracking down one’s back like generations
sprouting from a family tree.
These are maps, each a colorful arras
of pictograms and symbols,
an archive of devils and seraphs,
of the cosmos and the void.
Maps, one and all.
And their significance?
What shall be their importance,
ages and eons hence?
When the streams have dried,
and the crabs have hidden
in the sand of the ocean floor?
Only that maps etch themselves
and have recorded our paths and their ends
which lie in the distance like misty Incan ruins,
faint epitaphs of their architects.
