Pathfinders

These are the maps, the palimpsests,

Criss-cross routes congealing into lands.

Imaginary dialogues with potential objects

Hasten the explorer through his expanded self.

The itinerant cartographer, subtly violent,

Draws metaphors into his passage,

Bringing the invisible into focus.

He cherishes occasions,

Places that are means to travel more,

Experiments in ignorance and knowledge.

The centre is everywhere and nowhere.

These places are not their names,

Nor are their names translations.


Following dumb unlettered rivers,

Seeking out their sources,

The pathfinders surrender to a new syntax.

Armed with ambiguous terminology,

They slowly assemble landscapes,

Yielding to the lie of the language.

Naming, they inaugurate a history,

A sense of centres, edges and vectors;

Everywhere they tread is borderland.