MAP TO THE PARTY

IF you wait, you grow old, nothing
more. Traveling light is your only
illuminating illusion.

Either way you can't remain
time and place inseparable.
To settle is to amass names:

lespedeza, hickory, Providence Road.
To accelerate is to compress
latitude and longitude,

to shoulder wind in every
direction, to wear a hole
in the already worn cartography.

To grow old is to grasp sheer
granite faces, to negotiate
declivities and eruptions

of aspiration, to disbelieve
coded legends, to find instead
water's divides, to follow the rule

of thumb-civilization's always
down stream a steaming ruin,
a crumbling repository, a flow,

a seepage, the final flush
to sea level and lower. Buried in
the alluvium: Etruscan bronzes,

eroding pyramids coral-encrusted
hub caps, cracked glass fishing
floats. On an oil-blackened spit

the aging Archimedian rabble
gathers to count the grains
again, praying for a mistake.