A Map of Self-in-Progress

Vantage Points of Self

Imagining our psyche as a landscape - full of memory, experience, knowledge, questions, etc. - poetry is the arena we create in which we explore that landscape, searching for different high places from which we might get more information about our selves, our world, and our meaning. This first poem, then, is a rough draft playing with the idea of setting out from the center of our Self and exploring its periphery, which may indeed be more than periphery and more like bedrock or atmosphere.

Map at home, under old letters unused unread,
stick in hand for thick brush and beasts lurking
this new landscape - well, old - mine - my mind - 
stumbled upon, discovered, sections unexplored.

Yesterday stopped by a garden and sat on a straw bale to watch. 
Aged scotch and rain steadily changing the soil, softening crust. 
It's wet with no clouds - that happens, here, I reckon.

Rain rhythm, bull frogs, pond pomp and circumstances 
of not picking beetles off the potatoes, damn things died. 
"Till your fill, stake and fence, but beauty ain't shit
if bugs eat your fruit," I suggested, gently that it may arrive
labeled "Epiphany, General Delivery". Spray spray spray, 
the little monsters come back like every goddamned sin 
casually flicked aside by well-kept fingernails of a vain 
gardener in Spring. Fruit longed for is torture without
patience enough to wait and tend, so get to it, go - 
lest you have no potatoes when winter wanders wither.

Garden fades behind, its keeper keener on those noetic 
effects of beetles. I leave my boots at the front door
of myself - wash dishes, put away notes, redraw map later.