Typhoon Season (Zephyrus Winds)
Typhoons always rise from the west in summer
before the harvest when children learn to sing
from swans. When the last sea anemone flies by,
assess crop profits – color the land red or black.
Letter from Giovanni Francesco Camocio to Paulo Forlani April, 27, 1565
The whiteness of the page is your anxiousness –
it’s the land you do not know. Since it’s not yet yours,
leave it unbound. Plant tufts of crops, score odd beasts,
do what you will with this new world until I arrive.
Blasphemous Mapmaking Advice from the Middle Ages
Every map must encode a secret – hidden
treasure, a portal to hell, or proof the world
is a sphere – and its key decodes on the day
the sun casts no shadow and Cancer rises.
Lost Letter from Beatrice to Dante, May 7, 1290
Do not read or decipher
from the cartographer’s map –
they will fill you with false hopes,
with visions from their own minds.
Lost Letter from Beatrice to Dante, May 11, 1290
When you send me uninvited cantos,
whose lines cut like paths through your version of hell,
I know you have no soul, for the soul, like God, speaks –
the devil is the one who writes the contracts.
Vellum Riddle
A knife removed all matters of dross.
Unable to speak, I could not say no.
Hundreds of black parallels marked on my back
illuminate the world. I tell you where you are.