Persephone

One More Woman in Love with Old Maps

114 One More Woman in Love with Old Maps finds nothing of interest in revised and accurate Triple A and Frommer maps, can’t imagine a computer for the dash telling her where she has been, could be going. She wants a map she can hold in her hands and stroke like flesh, be like a lover she can unroll and lie under as if a Persian carpet, woven of yellows, the bluest blues. She wants mythical shapes, mysterious as a woman with a slightly raised skirt you could spend your life trying to decipher. Color is life she hears in a film, longing for washes of frankincense and ground amber, not a drainage ditch of a blueprint with nothing that isn’t rigid. She wants maps that are fiction, mysterious as carpets nomads spun out of pain and joy, sheered the wool from animals they slept coiled in the warmth of then plunged into vats of burning poppies, clarets, flame violets and Jerusalem cherries. Too little in her has been that raw wool soaking up color. She wants to lie in the coolness of a map drawer, wait in darkness for fingers that could smooth the riot of blood reds, onyx, a trail back to where something could start again ...