A Poetry Break: Old Territory. New Maps.

A Room of One's Own (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

When I read this, I was stopped. Sometimes poems do that to me.  Halt me in one breath and then invite me to wander, ponder, consider how the poem and the meaning I am making intersect with my life. This one does just that as poems about the tenacity of love often do. I am reminded of the journey I am taking with my husband and how space and time are so often measured by gesture, by suggestion, by longing and absence and the made thing. 

Old Territory. New Maps.

BY DEBORAH A. MIRANDA

You plan an uncomplicated path

through Colorado’s red dust,

around the caustic edge of Utah’s salt flats

a single night at a hotel

in the Idaho panhandle. Our plans change.

It’s spring, we are two Indian women along

together and the days open:

sunrise on a fine long road,

antelope against dry hills,

heron emerging from dim fields.

You tell me this is a journey

you’ve always wanted to take.

You ask me to tell you what I want.

I want my longing to miraculously

bring you through the barrier of your skin

into my blood so that I can possess you

entirely and yet be entirely possessed.

You say no, your face tight with pain, tears

burning your eyes, hands clenching the steering wheel.

I believe you. We drive hundreds of miles

across deserts sculpted by wind and story,

and I learn distance from my hand to your thigh,

your mouth to my mouth, the curve of a collar

along a warm, smooth neck.

You grin as if no one has ever seen you thus:

naked, savage, happy.

That is the beginning of yes.

Ghosts are everywhere.

We hear them singing on that mountain in Ute country,

the cries of your flute pleasuring old spirits.

Like those people whose land we cross,

we don’t live by lines drawn on paper.

Instead, we mark the waterfall of shy kisses,

a dry windy town where we exchange secrets in whispers,

the high cliff hollow that shelters us

on the edge of the Uinta forest.

Wildflowers bend beneath our bodies,

cup the trembling weight of touch.

We wander for awhile in a place vast enough

to contain all possibilities.

After twelve hundred miles together

we enter green forest thick along a fearless river.

This dense topography we can’t see through,

can’t find the horizon to judge distances

or the arc of the sun to know east from west.

There at last you clasp my hand, guide it

to a place beyond maps,

no universe I have ever known.

It is a raw landscape; we are the sojourners

overcome by the perilous shock of arrival.

We stop the car, walk by the river,

clumsy, frightened by desire. I wish

for more than body or soul can bear.

Sweet, these are the maps we made together,

territories we foolishly vowed to own.

Here, the place we wandered off the map,

moved deep into a land without scars

where every direction took us home

but no place could give us shelter.

I don’t know how to survive awakening

in a woman’s body with a child’s

broken heart. I fall on my knees, our love

a bare stone on the windowsill between us.

How can I learn this trick, will your body

back to the other side of my skin? Help me

translate loss the way this land does—

flood, earthquake, landslide—

terrible, and alive.

Miranda, Deborah A. (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen/Chumash). “Old Territory. New Maps.” from The Zen of La Llorona. Copyright © 2005 by Deborah A. Miranda.