Mapping the Waters of My Hand
by Maven Treecat

In my mind, I, like Meriwether,
intimately know the channels of blue
which run through the pale wilderness
on the back of my hand.
These waters flow from a source
somewhere between belly and breast
although sometimes I suspect
it hides in my throat
whenever I look to the future.
There is no guide, no woodsman,
and certainly no interpreter,
although many have offered
looking to be sister to my chief concerns.
The truth is I only know my role
as a captain among politicians
watching with curious eye
and idly playing scholar
despite no works to my name.

I count the streams each morning
mapped into my very flesh
hoping they might reveal Truth
or at least some truth.
Instead, I have only found
that their life springs from snow
once bright and light
now shrinking weakly away
to reveal a rocky past.
The geologists of my mind claim
that those hard peaks grow
soon to surpass Everest.
My only solace in this expedition
is that those jagged peaks' growth
might eventually soar above clouds
to place that hopeful white
in air thin and cold enough
to make the rivers run more still.

I am not the first to tred here,
but as I walk this wild land
I cannot help but fantasize myself
as more than a mere visitor
and somehow more justified.
Even ignoring this grave sin,
I know that my good faith
and peaceful intentions
will do nothing to shelter others
from the lack of humanity to come.
No one who walks this way West
can escape those city-bred leaders
who, confident in their mastery,
do not know what it is like
to live in the terrible majesty
of unrestrained nature and humanity.
They imagine they are above it,
as perhaps their conquest proves.

In my mind, I, like Meriwether,
have been appointed representative,
somehow responsible for those
intimately familiar for millenia
with the horrors of the wilds
and still live in harmony with them.
No matter what I do to imitate,
I cannot exist as they do.
No matter what I do to protect,
men critique and smear my attempts
to give my heart to this duty.
My maps mean nothing
when the expanse shrinks,
more and more of my body claimed
by a society that demands more,
much more than I can give.
My greatest fear, like Meriwether,
is never making it to civilization.

And terrified, like Meriwether,
I do not what to dread more:
losing land and life to those
who never took the journey I did
or the pale, small hand upon which
those tired blue channels flow.