From a tossing raft, imperiled coast after scrawled coast,
I surveyed the world alone-
Its complexity beyond my capacity to encapsulate.
All my many maps were but mere topoi of convention.
Simulacra all, a reflection of a reflection,
A pretense of reality that perhaps had no reality at all,
Merely malformations of the actual I had typified.
My facsimiles of the world were but crude caricatures of it.
I couldn't convince myself otherwise, going around in circles
In a maelstrom of sight,
Part objective, part subjective, in which the compass of my senses
Spun dizzily,
In which my tiny telescope vacuumed the world into my eye
But brought it no closer to my understanding.
And my sad collection of archaic maps
That were my guides,
Faulty, all faulty.
All my tools and methods impaired and faulty.
My flawed abstractions finally brought the realization that
A symbolist, not a topographer, was I.
For decades I drifted, tracing the shape of remote, desolate
coasts
That led to bestial, uncivilized interiors- savage
and unknown.
The heartland core forever a secret into which I bewilderedly gazed,
Able to see only so far within, shocked by the brutishness that emerged.
With a shaking hand
I devised one final map upon a tormented sea,
With one jittery line
I drew the whole rootless projection of the world
Into two dimensions: a point, a line, a point.
I drew a map that led
To the edge of the world, and there
Many monsters thrashed and writhed
In apocalyptic corners that waterfalled into an abyss.
I carefully charted their location on my map
For other mariners to avoid,
Having valiantly met
Their desperate basilisk gaze
Eye to eye.
I had always tangled the bounded finite
With the unbounded infinite,
But now my maps successfully
Were unable to distinguish
Any difference at all.
I am done drawing this world on a flat surface.
As my long, loving, dangerous voyage in it
Now approaches its end,
It is the curvature of space and time that bend as one
That I wish henceforth to survey and explore.
I am confident that I will not need a map
there.
The stars' topography, the topography of my mind.
Topos: a convention or motif, especially in a literary work; a rhetorical convention.
