Cartography
In the white afternoon along Iowa’s route 20, the land snow-heavy and enormous, I blinked and drifted into the trajectory of a tanker of hog’s blood. No collision this time, no red smash in the unplowed shoulder. In Galway, we escaped the rain and in the back pew of a cathedral on the Corrib listened to an organist rehearse for mass. Music, you said, is a roadmap to the soul. With left hand the organist plumbed our defeat, and the right routed the up-trickle of our hopes. Those old maps are more feel than measure. They won’t lead anywhere we’re not set to go. The satellite image on my phone is more accurate: once I was the green arrow, I hope to become the red square. I must only with my gas foot and fingertips lead this traveling blue dot home. We never believed in guides, only intuition—we haggled our border crossings, ignored weather advisories, let strangers map our itinerary. Maybe the crash was coming; maybe the crash still is.
Andrew Payton is a writer, learning designer, and climate advocate living in Harrisonburg, Virginia with his partner and children. His work is featured or forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, and elsewhere, and won the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. He is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and teaches at Eastern Mennonite University.
