(as appeared in Tucumcari Literary Review)

          To My Cartographer


The day you write that final loving word
and sail, unburdened, high upon the swells
returning home, knowing you've been heard
along a distant shore, have pressed its shells
in footprints, seeded savage ears with lore
of wicked beauty; when you trade your beads
for land: 
             Forget that turbid, foreign roar
of surf along my native sands; those reeds
that danced around the inlet's marshy flanks,
the spinner dolphins wild within your wake
and how they hurled themselves in happy thanks.
Forget this land, for now your flag is staked
upon a world you cannot wholly claim,
and paining you, it scorns its very name.