Magnetic North

by Alice Templeton

 

1.

Here is my compass    my parting gift 
 

Flattened pennies    half a heart    would do

but this is my chosen pact:    point of reference 
 

place of convergence    no one’s destination    

Agree with me    This is an urge we will honor   
 

the casual yearning toward north    orienting us

until the day our world turns in its vast sleep   
 

reversing the ordinary poles 
 

2.

Even standing still    we dwell in countless spaces    
 

I mark my place on the street    squaring up to gutters

tuning my breath to the broken drum of traffic    
 

I fix myself in time    by jobs or songs 

by the length of winters    with or without 
 

the chafe of love    And gazing down from the bluff

I judge my foothold by the river’s crazy logic    
 

my likeness buoyed on the impish surface    sunk 

in a single swirling eye    Where am I?    
 

3.

Where do I meet you if you or I get lost   
 

caught in a turnstile    confused by the sting of volts 

and barbs guarding the shiftless borders?
 

Walk the face of this earth   gouged by machines 

that lumber across it ripping deliberate wounds
 

and you will come to a rift that stops you short…  
 

4.

The practical map is marked by ‘true’ north
 

the world in neat degrees    latitudes and longitudes       

pinned to the ends of the earth’s axes    packaged
 

parcels of angular blue and green    drawn 

from high above    A different path    oblique    
 

and strange    takes as its direction the pull and play 

of magnetic north    Moored loosely to nowhere 
 

it drifts imperceptibly in our time    creeping toward 

cataclysm a thousand or a billion years away
 

salvation or doom    turning the earth on its head 

and the charts inside out    
 

5.

                                                          I want no maps    

 
no prophecies    just this compass to remind me:   

this is a force that keeps us    ever tremulous    
 

always found    With every turn the needle 

quivers northward    despite a worried hand 
 

and designs warping the land    Drawn to imbalance    

into another step    we make our way by fevers 
 

and gesture    Feel us lean    our bodies straining 

the vain boundaries of ‘true’ north    bent    
 

to the call of our singular place and time    pulled 

by this gently moored desire    to know for ourselves 
 

where we are    and how    amid such damage    

the earth’s body still guides our own

---

Alice Templeton’s poems have appeared in Calyx, Poetry, Nimrod, Asheville Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook Archaeology won the 2008 New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry from Finishing Line Press. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, Blue Mountain Center, and Vermont Studio Center, and is currently on the board of the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Originally from Tennessee, she now lives in Berkeley, California.