British Library > Cartographic Items > Maps 225.c.61 > Olaus Magnus, 1539
Is the Carta Marina’s use limited
for one with neither boat nor sleigh?
It will unite past and present day,
redraw my city’s map in my own head.
It’s past noon. The generous morning
has been singed away and with it
indolence. Off the bus, I cross the sunlit
Euston Road, vacantly humming.
They’ve stopped insisting on the use of gloves
and besides, I’ll handle just a copy:
Uppsala’s original isn’t for sloppy
amateurs, no matter how inquisitive.
Drawn as much from fiction as it is from fact,
Olaus Magnus, court cartographer’s chart
is a land known less by head than heart,
pulsing with legend, lake, steppe, pact.
Here and there a corner thrums with tense affray
between long gone entities. Armies. Goblins. Red snows.
What can it mean for the land below their bows
to ache in ink still, here today?
Offshore, a dozen cousins of Charybdis wend,
arctic Scyllas lurking just off-page,
gleeful perils at the ready, they rage
and wait for the age of enlightenment to end.
I’m hours under the high lights at long tables.
lingering ’til closing, then shooed hence
with apologetic rudeness.
Most librarians are predictable.
It’s autumn and the evening’s wrapped
around the city damply, blurred and wet.
Tower blocks assume a gloom; their unlit
corners seethe with mythic beasts. Doors won’t coapt.
écumeur des rives
There is a sort
of man, a catégorie,
with dark gallic curls
and a delicate nose too small
to offset his mop of hair.
He appears always being drawn
backwards by the weight
of it. In the slatted shade
beneath the wobbly bridge,
the Thames’ true brown,
its neo-Victorian smelling-salt stink.
One of these sorts
of men stands, nostrils
offended, flicking French fag-ash into the murk.
The patter of the Seine,
he thinks, its sunny lap-laugh against
the Pont des Artes,
is nothing like
the cold cackle of its northern cousin.
He thinks of a mudlark, searching, sinking, without
knowing the English word.
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Erin Clark is an American writer living and working in London. She is the author of Sacred Pavement. Her poems have appeared in Pilcrow & Dagger, About Place, and The Scores. She can be found online at emclark.co or at the Twitter handle @e_m_clark.
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