The Map Displaces Place

The nomad’s only landmark—the roving body traversing circumfluent space

Find a way to lose the map

You won’t find ecstasy in it

Freezing the ceaselessly flowing, leaving out everything that moves,

The map leaves the traveler unmoved

Still like the photograph it fascinates, as the dead transfix the quick

The wanderer’s true north eludes the map

Dwelling in the swelling intersection of motion and emotion,

The traveler follows the veering vectors of becoming

Till north’s unhinged from south, west released from east

The trajectory of the event is impossible to map

Attuned to contingency the wanderer turns

From the rationality of calculation to the dance of chance

Parmenides’ dream, Heraclitus’ horror, the map is drawn by contradiction

Eluding the deadlocked jurisdiction of contradiction, the traveler, roving paradox, valediction to negation, wanders off the map

Where the map is a fantasy of fixity, the traveler is an ecstasy of transition

Where

is

here

when

it's

nowhere

on

a map?