A
Question Of Geography by Barbara Phillips
geography
was once a vague dimension
too
strange for me to make sense of
school
texts brimmed with statistics
and
maps of peculiar shapes and colours
I
wondered who picked the shades
and
whether anyone had ever asked
permission
to paint one region that sickly
purple
or that dull orange that sat on the page
like
rinds rotting in the compost
at
the end of my father's garden
the
world I understood traced
itself
along the creek, puddle- warm
surprised
by cray fish, sun-polished
scuttling
idly away from my toes
squishing
mud-tarnished bubbles into pebbles
that
slid closer to banks held by cattails
brushed
soft by summer days
but
one day when seasons
lost
their allure, and days
plodded
into grey evenings,
my
brother called me with
news
from deserts in an African nation
sweating
its way into the twenty-first century
he
said he was coming back to Canada
to
be treated for malaria
and
it was just as well
because
he had been bitten
by
a camel that refused to move
when
he and his entourage
were
to head into oil fields
the
atlas that had been eating
at
my mind fell open
I
saw at once how far home is
from
where you are
when
you start to fret
about
a place that becomes
more
strange while you try
so
hard to follow all the lines
within
the space whose colour
you
cannot describe and cannot name
