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"Cartography"
by
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I want to know your body as I know
these sandstone cliffs behind our house-take treks
for weeks along your spine, traverse your neck
with slow, exploratory eyes and go
for long excursions on your limbs with no
set plan for how I might get home, except
to know that you will lead me there. I'll step
so lightly, leave no evidence. And oh,
the maps I'll make, my love, will not be made
of paper but of tune. No rise of you
will be unknown to me, no inch unsung.
I know topographies change by the day—
that wind and water have their way. So true.
A good mapmaker's work is never done.
About the Author
Organic fruit grower, mother, and life-lover Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Southwest Colorado. Her books include Insatiable, If You Listen, and Charity: True Stories of Giving and Receiving. She is poet laureate of San Miguel County, sings with a 7-woman acappella group, Heartbeat, and has all kinds of poetic ideas for you on her website, wordwoman.com.
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Bed of Roses Love Sonnet Contest Winner
Finalists
In Garrison Keillor's latest book, Lake Wobegon native Margie Krebsbach dreams up the idea of a trip to Rome, hoping to get her husband Carl to make love to her — he's been sleeping across the hall and she has no idea why. She finds a patriotic purpose for the journey. A Lake Wobegon boy, Gussie Norlander, died in the liberation of Rome, 1944, and his grave, according to his elderly brother, Norbert, is in a neglected weed patch near the Colosseum...
It's a story of Wogegonians in a strange land, telling stories of kinship and self-revelation — all delivered with Keillor's trademark humor.
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From Garrison Keillor:
“When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorize Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state’ for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth. The sonnet is a durable good. These 77 of mine include sonnets of praise, some erotic, some lamentations, some street sonnets and a 12-sonnet cycle of months. If anything here offends, I beg your pardon, I come in peace, I depart in gratitude.”
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