Mapping 494: Shaping your World
Riley Bowen

Here the dog park runoff sickens
the river. You could lose a limb 
like that I heard, by getting wet,
wading too deep.

It’s too late now, the English Terrier 
tears a hole in the Dachshund, his spit
stymies the wound, the water washes it out.

The rocks are struck by overhead light, 
the West wind weaves clouds into cotton sheets, 
and I describe this place as unassembled: 
the parts in bags, a fallen chair, slipped from paradise.
The river is unlivable.

In the map of this world, your head marks North, 
your hands stretch out to touch the banks, 
cupping the water, stopping the drainage.

Listen, we’ll fold wet into dry,
and let the bell toll this memory 
a while longer. 

Mapping 494: Shaping your World (Prose Poem Version)

I heard a story of a girl in Northampton who went swimming in Paradise Pond and got so sick she had to take two weeks off school. I imagined that maybe she could lose a limb from whatever sort of bacteria she had encountered in the pond. I also heard that the dog park near the campus dirties the water in the river. I was watching dogs playing in the water one afternoon and thought about how scary it is when dogs fight, and how it's hard to tell play fighting from real fighting. It was so beautiful that day I pictured where I was sitting as a bedroom, or a universe, or someplace to live for a long time. I thought about Plato's Theory of Forms, or the very small part of it I think I understand, that everything is a corrupted version/imitation of an ideal which does not actually exist. The Connecticut River does not exist as a moment I can live in, this idea is corrupted, by dirty water and dog violence, and trillions of other things. I was sitting there with someone I love, and this also seemed to be corrupted by the fact that the room-moment-universe of sitting there together was going to be over soon.