The Map Worm 

by Tom Bowker

No one who can read a map need grow old.
I’m a map worm.
I read maps Like I read books, to mine the
treasures in them.
But not road maps, or town and city maps,
disciplined, stood to attention maps.
Far rather I would spread across the table
an unruly map.
A map whose grid squares are clotted with
hachures
Or ringed with contours as tight and numerous
as the rings on the forlorn stump of a felled sequoia.
Mark that spell – here be wild mountain country.

Now, like me, my maps are worn by age, weather and use.
Most lack covers, their folds are tissue thin,
part easily and open on holes not corners.
Tucked inside them are hours of reading
and day dreaming about mountain country
and mountain dreamers.

When I crackle them across the table
from them falls old peat, heather and grass.
And when I take a sybaritic sniff
of this desiccated mountain snuff
those dreams come alive again.
Across the dark screen of my closed eyelids pass
a multitude of mountains climbed.
Albion’s glorious diversity of hills, and Alpine crests
like the folded wings of Earth.
A gang of gritty northern lads and bonny northern girls,
all crag mates, hill mates.

On a sunset Lakeland fell I kiss a girl.
The first of a lifetime’s kisses.
On the same hill I hold our child’s hot hand
whilst humping another upon my back.
I gasp round the Yorkshire Three Peaks chasing our
gangling grandson’s gallop.

All these riches from a shelf of battered maps.
I am still a map worm, still read maps,
still mine treasures from them,
still tuck fresh dreams into their worn folds.
I am an old man but I can read maps.