Two Poems by Colin Bancroft

The Map Is Not the Territory

This hill is nothing like the sheet.
Nothing is flat, silent, static.
The land rises and falls like the sea
And is as vast and dark and ambivalent.
The paper carries with it none of the colour
Of the purple heather or the clay pools
On the track that look like vats of tea.
The page brings nothing to bear of the sky,
Hammered over us like a tin roof,
Rattling with rain, lifted and wind-thrown.
The map knows nothing of animals,
The oystercatchers frantic circling beep,
Or the spluttering engine of the grouse,
Nor the bleached skull of a sheep
Left as totem on the dry-stone wall.
And so it is for all of the places
We inhabit, the map is not the territory:
Not Time, nor History, not even the body
With its othered curves and dips,
Strange colours and noise. So familiar
In its state of skin-deep symbolism
That we forget about the unseen world below
Where fear or cancer or love
Is all going on, is beginning to grow.

Gone to Seed

The old shed was half-hidden underneath
A tarpaulin of leaves and a scaffold
Of low-hanging branches, so it could barely
Be seen from the lane. I squeezed through the gap
In the gate, its swing stoppered by silt, ballast
Dumped by the burn in last year’s flood.
Inside were a few oil drums, rolls of barbed wire,
And an old tractor that had been left to rust.
I climbed into the cab, the seat a sphagnum sponge,
The instrument panel a secret nook of dust.
It must have sat there for years, unmoved,
As the sunlight traced the seasons on the wall,
Simply left after one last harvest or plough
By someone who was not coming back for it now.

Colin Bancroft is currently working on a PhD on the Ecopoetics of Robert Frost. His pamphlets are Impermanence (Maytree Press), Kayfabe (Broken Sleep|Legitimate Snack), and most recently Knife Edge (Broken Sleep). He is editor at Nine Pens Press and runs the Poets' Directory.