Map Making by S. Morgan

What becomes of the souls of birds?

Do they turn to maps?

As the year wheels,

Do they chart a world beyond the oecumene?

Those navigators circling their huge gyres

Now South, now North: ever true.

Celestial bodies guide their flights

Creating cartas, invisible to the human eye.

Each pinion scribing perfect parabolas,

Conic sections, sky-wide contour lines,

Across the planet’s page.

And, when careless, they let drop a single remex

It falls to me

To strip the shaft of silk

To cure the calamus in sand and hot ashes,

To slit its horny, grey, translucent tip

To let it carry oak gall and iron

To my pumiced vellum.