Poetry: From the July/August 2011 issue | See all poetry
The Vinland Map
When we take off from Reykjavik, the ground is parchment and inkwash. Black veins
of rivers, black lakes, the ridged vacant green-brown-gold of a relief map.
In school our crackling pull-down maps were so outdated there were still expanses
of white on them. White which meant deepest darkest. Terra Incognita. Which means:
what the map disguises, what we don’t recognize yet. Those troubled me as a child,
blanks and the beyonds of edges, the sprawl of Mercator, the globe flattened
into parabolas of Earth. We like the world contained, defined by its names, even as we want boundaries to push against. Icy Greenland, green Iceland. I trace the flight route
in the airline magazine and look out at the dark Atlantic. Whatever its provenance,
the Vinland map feels true. The nervous notched teeth of its coastlines, the jigsaw
islands’ orderly drift. How the known world huddles its landmasses together
under the careful arc of the North. At the edge of the western ocean a floating fragment
of the new world stares out like a mask: single skull eye, open mouth.
