Hurlow - Maps

 

Marcia Hurlow MAPS

—for Jean B. Hurlow


Be careful what you love.

My mother loved maps.

She loved tracing the blue

lines, the red lines, looking

up the cities that bloomed

on those stems.  She loved

to find their music, recipes

for food whose spices never

existed at her grocery.

She loved Dad’s stories

of towns he’d seen in Europe.

Even blighted by war

they were lovely on maps

though she’d never fly

to those gold circles,

ornate as Greek myths. 

And as maps of neurons

crossed and disappeared

with age she forgot the map

of her hometown that got her

to her sister’s house, brought

her milk and bread.  Off that

shrinking grid were storms

and monsters.  As we talked

in her yellow kitchen, 

the snow gathered like nests 

in branches of the maples.  

The buzz of a dying 

bulb above us, I asked 

about her trips to California, 

Nevada and a week 

in downtown Cleveland.

What a small map to travel

compared to her dreams.

So this is what love does:

reshapes thought, the last

synapses of memory. She

leaned in, confided that on

the way to Paris, she and Dad

had landed in London

just to say they’d been there.   


"Maps" is in Marcia Hurlow's second full-length poetry collection, currently making the rounds of contests. Her first, Anomie, won the Edges Prize. She has five chapbooks and serves as the senior poetry editor of Kansas City Voices.