In response to a request for poems inspired by misreadings, Tad Richards posted one of his at New-Poetry yesterday that I very much liked. About it, he said, "I do have a poem based on a misread statement that was sorta interesting. Reading an article about a performance artist, I came across the statement that she explored a territory where the only map is the map of the bear.

"I thought this was one of the most fascinating ideas I'd ever read. Then I looked again and saw that it actually said she explored a territory where the only map is the map of the heart. This was a territory, I realized, which held no interest whatever for me. But what about that territory where the only map is the map of the bear? I wanted to know more about that...a territory where the wilderness mapped itself. I had been deeply moved by Kurosawa's great movie, Dersu Uzala, where mapmaking becomes a symbol for both exploration and limitation, and I started to feel that I had to know more about the territory mapped only by the bear. This was the poem that came of it."

THE MAP OF THE BEAR

The only map is the map of the bear.
Your best hope is to follow it closely,
Closer than dogs.  It's engraved with your spoor,
You wake in the night to find it partly
Charred by the dying fire.  The only
 
Map is the map of the bear.  Follow
It closer than dogs.  Your best hope is
To read the part engraved below
The surface of the fire.  Sleepless,
You move by night.  The only map is
 
The map of the bear.  Dogs know,
That's why they follow with no hope
The dying spoor.  You're passing through
Fire, you've passed through sleep,
Now the only map is the map
 
Of the bear.  Now hope gives up
Its secrets, now you follow where
Dogs won't go, even in sleep.
Above, the route's engraved on fire.

To me, what makes this poem exceptional is "even in sleep"--which the poet later said was one of the last touches he added to the poem. Like all good poems, it immediately made me want to compose a related poem, in this case one that considered some kind of map opposed to the map of the bear (which, yes, is near-infinitely more interesting than the "map of the heart"). I'm all for following such maps as that of the bear, but I think following the map of Apollo, as I'm calling it in the poem I'm trying to make (thanks to Gregory. St. Thomasino's reminding me of Neitzsche's use of Apollo), is severely under-rated, and seldom written of by poets.

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