hic sunt dracones
it says on the Hunt-Lennox globe,
its copper halves wired together.
The words mark
the eastern coat of Asia.
Here are dragons.
Half a century later,
we wonder still
did the maker mean
Komodo dragons?
Sea monsters?
The Dagroian people
whom Marco Polo reported
would eat the dead
and lick their bones?
Or was it simply a nod
to how frightening
it feels at the edge
of the known?
Tonight my son calls me
with an unbearable ache,
his map of the world
torn.
Though I am far away,
or perhaps because of that,
we are close.
Our voices say the words
we least want to say.
Our hearts are porous
and soft.
I want to tell him
that the dragons are not
at the edge of the map.
They are inside us.
And sometimes
they are more evil
than the most evil
we could imagine.
And sometimes,
though we’d rather
hate them, they are beautiful.
Instead I tell him
these are difficult times.
The globe, the third oldest
terrestrial globe in the world,
about the size of a grapefruit,
was bought by an architect
named Hunt. He told his friend
he had bought the object
in Paris for a song.
He let his children toy with it.
The friend begged
Hunt to keep the globe safe.
None of us are safe.
I fear I have let my dragons
escape, that they have flown
into my son.
Let him toy with them then,
the old ways of thinking
about the world—
let the unknown
become a place for play.
Here are dragons,
I think, as I redraw
the map, and write
the words on my face.
They sprout wings
and pick me up
with their terrible claws
and fly me to the cliffs
of my life
and drop me
over the edge.