Being Given A Minute To Clean Up The World

Fascinated with atlases the where of how places be I fly over their coloured surfaces aware of sea shading into different declensions as a continental shelf suddenly deepens under the cartographer’s hand & I get dizzy my fingertip tracing the Nile as sensuously as a seam on a lady’s stocking I follow it from its birth to its delta mountains rise underneath my hands as I turn pages quickly to connect them up taste the strange sounds upon my tongue holy as Holy Communion. I create the world in my living room & with the aid of a blue crayon the Dnieper & the Dniester flow down the last leg of the table followed by the Tigris & the Euphrates on their continuous journey across sun-splashed linoleum Sofiya (a jewelled brooch belonging to my mother) I in my infinite wisdom placing high on a sofa quite near a chipped China cup representing San Francisco (geographical accuracy didn’t matter) only the world walking over the floor A4 by hastily scribbled A4 a collection of shoes & slippers becoming the Carpathian Mountains blue ribbons becoming river after river after... until my mother (rather sorry now I guess that she made me in the first place) opens the door with a gasp: “My God Donall! Just what on earth do you think you’re doing? ” “Creating the world! ” I say with awe. She sees only mess & tells me to clean up the world ...this minute! ******* I used to love and be amazed with atlases as a child...stunned that there were so many places that were real to so many people but not to me and that my place known to me was just as unreal to someone else. So it was that I would be familiar with the geography of Bulgaria or Hungry or Romania or delighting in the strange sounds of place names like sherbet on my tongue. I would endlessly draw them and take atlases apart and continue on where they left off or make everything in the room whether it be a chipped China cup or a sofa become or stand in for Sofiya or a mountain range. I liked the names of the rivers Dnieper and Dniester and so they stayed with me all this time. And so once again after all this time casting an eye over a map of Bulgaria this poem jumped into my head as I jumped onto a bus coming back from a concert and there they were in all my scribble and scrawls just waiting and willing me to type them and... ....so I did!