Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
-the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves' own conformation:
and Norway's hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
-What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors
commentary
the journey with images of sea and earth, sand and sky, each colored or shadowed blues and greens. Despite the clear mapping, there are questions as to whether these charted lands are lifting, leaning, pulling, or pushing at each other to keep them in these positions that we have so “perfectly” recorded. The journeyer notes an ABBADDC rhyme scheme present and moves on. Now in the body paragraph, said reader is bombarded with images of lands “l[aying] still,” and bodies of water “expected to blossom, as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.” One cannot help, however, but to notice the derivation from reality here. These lands are not truly meant to be so still and oiled onto a piece of paper; they are packed with the buzz of life, constantly in motion and flux. These seas are bubbling with marine life and unseen mystery which could never be portrayed in an ink replication. Next the reader experiences the obvious lack of accuracy in this guide. Words and names flow between geographic features, labels for cities overlap onto mountains and towns out to sea.The reader begins to see that along with these rhyme schemes limiting the word choice of the poet, these sections of the poem describe restrictions, boundaries, and borders present in the creation of the map. The printer was victim to his own emotion and bias in the coloring and certain aspects of the creation of the map which steered the replica even further from reality. Just as words are arbitrary signals that we assign meaning to, map keys and colors are choice symbols that really have no relation to the thing they are supposed to represent. Just like a word has no meaning without context, it takes context to understand locations and positioning on a map. Similarly, as language can be better understood through the exploration of binary opposites, land and sky, water and earth, mountains and valleys, and North and South all need to exist to understand the meaning of the other. If all land was elevated there would be no meaning or purpose to elevation maps, these guides all rely on this opposition or else there would be nothing to chart, everything would be analogous.
As the reader completes his venture through “The Map,” he sees that the printer is the poet, fruitlessly attempting to create a real-to-life experience that will never be more than a medium on which a reader can project his own internalizations. The map is a frivolous attempt at recreating life and earth that is too changing and inconsistent to ever be committed to paper in any real sense
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