The inside of my brain is lined with maps.
Or is that my heart?
Definitely my bathroom.
When you come in the house, you can see
the tiny room across from the door is papered with maps.
Crete keeps falling down, and who could blame it?
It’s old and the paper feels more like fabric: quiet and thick,
yet it tears at the slightest glance of tape.
It’s an island shaped like a funky dragon
dotted with Hertz Rentals, and I love it.
The others maps are closer to home:
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maine, Yellowstone.
Ontario.
If I made a map of dreams,
all my moonlit roads would lead there.
If I could chart my childhood,
all streams would flow from one Canadian lake.
It has been so many years since I’ve seen it,
more than half my life.
If I went back, what would happen?
Like trying to take a Polaroid of Narnia —
would it implode?
Like soil samples from Neverland —
it could slide out from under me
and vanish.
Would Canada take back its memories,
and the dreams it bestowed?
What about the blue-gold dream
when I was a dolphin girl
swimming in the sun-sparkled quiet shallows?
Maybe.
I’m willing to take that risk someday
to bring my children to the place
they have heard so many simple stories about:
the baby sparrow, the caterpillar tree, the mean dog.
The sand hill, higher than a house.
My uncle catching frogs for bait and
me setting them free when he wasn’t looking,
his anger.
How I got this scar on my leg, the territorial barn swallows,
the water — always it is the water
in the background of every memory.
I can forget the sky, the grass, the leafy trees —
it was always summer there —
but never the water stretched out like an open palm.
Did you know I am part mermaid?
It’s true.
Not the part that can swim well, because I can’t.
The part that loves and loves and loves the water,
never wanting to leave.
I can swim like magic in my sleep,
and always no matter where I am
that lake in Ontario shimmers
and holds my heart beating beneath its gentle tides.
I have an overflowing binder of maps from
magazines, atlases, the trash, school,
from friends, from this town and other countries.
I don’t even know all the maps I’ve got in there,
this collection surprises even me.
But I do know the one map I no longer have: Jamaica.
I remember finding it at a library sale, adopting it,
and sitting in my room staring at the shape of Jamaica
with blue blue blue all around it.
I have never been to an island, and because of that
there is something magic about them.
My eyes snagged on Runaway Bay,
mesmerized by the name, the letters.
I gave that precious map as a gift, an apology really,
for something I should never have been apologizing for,
and have missed it far longer than I missed the man I gave it to.
I knew I would never go to Jamaica, but it was his dream.
I wonder where that map is now, if it and the ex ever made it there.
I live inside my ultimate map, a cartographical woman.
These constellations of freckles, these stretch marks,
lines on my knuckles and eyelids and lips,
these 2 long scars, perpendicular and unrelated.
My son asks if the biggest scar will ever go away.
No, I say, it’s here forever.
I don’t mind since it reminds me that I nearly died
but didn’t.
My hands, I watch them aging
back and forth through time:
today they look like my grandmother’s hands at 75,
tomorrow they will look like my own at 15.
I wonder at my eyes, at what they tell,
what they keep secret.
I have never been good at hiding my feelings,
a talent I would love to have.
If only I could pin my heart inside my coat
instead of on my sleeve,
it would be an improvement even if
you still heard it thumping like a drum
when I try to stay calm.
Here in this body are my childhood, my children,
my grief and my mistakes,
my blissful moments.
This form is my map, my country.
The roads and coasts it has named,
and its empty, unmarked places
are equally beautiful:
the known and unknown,
the past and future,
glowing at the edges and flowing as water.
