babyhead

a dream as snow touched the roof

There are six lane highways.

There is the aerial view.

There are overpasses piped out in baby doll curls and there are underpasses that just snake away.

There are off-ramps and empty weight-stations; utility turn-offs with gates poised in consideration.

There are perfect circles of turf and clusters of islands moated in sandy granite surrounding rounds cut out of a legendary green untouched by human feet.

There is sunshine arriving from no particular direction suggesting something that only a woman knows. There is sky woven from the Baltic Sea.

There are gray eyes looking at me from behind cat eyeglasses; smirking about a question that I will forever own.

There is silence and restless hands.

There is a word that begs to be defined.

and

I get a right-handed pass of an oversized atlas and a request to coordinate two uncertain points in space.

The tool I have been given is robust

but inadequate.

There are maps, yes, maps that burn in reds and a topographer's favorite orange. There at silos spotting landscapes spreading tales of grain production; populations represented in rounded bald headed icons, apple production in the Northwest, and the spilled ink of the oceans valleys.

but

the exact directions between where we were and where we are to be, are not represented. I thumb back and forth as the landscape persists in mimicking idealized roads, built before I was born.

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