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.