Map Making by S. Morgan
What becomes of the souls of birds?
Do they turn to maps?
As the year wheels,
Do they chart a world beyond the oecumene?
Those navigators circling their huge gyres
Now South, now North: ever true.
Celestial bodies guide their flights
Creating cartas, invisible to the human eye.
Each pinion scribing perfect parabolas,
Conic sections, sky-wide contour lines,
Across the planet’s page.
And, when careless, they let drop a single remex
It falls to me
To strip the shaft of silk
To cure the calamus in sand and hot ashes,
To slit its horny, grey, translucent tip
To let it carry oak gall and iron
To my pumiced vellum.
