The Mapmaker and His Woman

He should be working on his maps, but instead
he spends the day thinking that she is the distance between
point A and point B.  She is Germany, in black and white, Czechoslovakia,
perhaps, in brown tones, the mountains and rivers
placed just so, the land falling and rising
exactly according to scale.

The paper his fingertips touch is dry,
not like her, such fertile land rolling with meadows and ponds.
Whenever he thinks of her, he thinks of
a peak atop peaks, a valley lush with valleys.
But lately she’s always somewhere else:
museums, coffee shops with hissing steam, fruit markets,
intersections he can’t quite locate.
He’s only sure about highways, each inch equaling exactly a hundred miles,
about the dark ink dots of towns
etched into thick parchment.

His job is to measure the world: 
nothing on his map except what’s actually there— 
river, a bluff that causes a
highway to angle, the blue dirt roads like capillaries that wrap the earth.
She’s somewhere in that world, he knows:  cafes, aquariums, aviaries
where her eyes latch onto soaring birds.
And he’s inside, the four plaster walls slowly gliding toward him,
flattening him so precisely
he could be the thin line between two rectangular countries.

He wishes he could just forget about his maps,
all their lines squirming crazily
as if etched by earthworms, his maps
with the black and red stars of cities
that never light up the flattened paper.                      

Instead he’d like to close his eyes and dream  
of fish or birds, of swimming or flying.
Instead he’d like to write a poem about her
on the back of his hand,
the looping blue letters
that tattoo his skin rising and falling with each movement of his fingers.
In the evening, when she finally steps through the doorway, 
he’s still sitting at his desk, an acre
of blank paper spread out in front of him.
She walks close to him, an apple still in her hand, feathers on her shoulders.
She is Bohemia in color—he can sense all the miles
on the soles of her shoes.
He wants to tell her how far away he felt from her
when she was gone, but his tongue is a discarded train ticket.
The only words he can think of are awkwardly pronounced cities: 
Istanbul, Mazatlan, Kuala Lumpur, Dusseldorf.  

Done with your map? She might ask, the liquid sound
of her words startling him.
And he might answer by pointing to the window, its clear transparency
he polished with his eyes all afternoon.
At first their conversation will be circular,
like the dark blue concentric lines
that indicate the depth of an ocean.
He wants to tell her she is that body of water, but his cracked lips
are caught on Budapest, Mayapan, Monongahela, Salamanca.

There is no ending because what they have between them
is a map that, no matter where you follow it,
leads to the same place each time:
There, in its center, you’ll find two people,
waiting alone near a small road, or the stitched scar of a railroad track.
Two people, standing on uncharted ground,
staring at each other, their eyes understanding, finally,
that they are the shortest distance between two points.

Bill Meissner   

This poem was first published in the NOTRE DAME REVIEW, fall, 2008.