Part V
Annotations are below, matched to superscript footnotes in the text
Map of My Country
annotated by John Holmes
V.
Memory streaming behind me in the wind
Unfolds in blowing colors, and is lost,
Unless words call it out of the air to keep;
Torrents and banners in the rain and sun,
Until I hang the wind of time on a wall.
Today is noise all day in the nearest street,
A name now, a hurt here, and work well done.
Today is now, and tomorrow dimly written.
But I am up early to remember and believe.
Surely as earth goes turning underfoot
To speed me toward the light, and light beyond,
The days to come will ripple the brimming past,
And memory take my color in the wind. ³⁴
34) This brief passage in blank verse, which I find it a pleasure part physical to copy again, was placed here as contrast to the looser cadences that precede it, as I had placed the short rhymed section after the opening section. It also was written earlier, and I thought it appropriate here in the plan of the poem for a second reason. It is almost a prelude to the whole, but I had no intention of making introductory declarations of a general sort. I thought that by using it as an interlude here it would become a recapitulation, a summing-up, not of specific content thus far, but of mood, the continuing desire to search memory, that the past be not forgotten. Autobiographical, but in terms of the map an image beyond my skill to draw on the sheet, though I can visualize it as background pattern over the whole spread - streaming banners of weather, time, color, light, always in motion and alive under the contours and the lettering.