Workshop Result: Magnetic North (updated)

Magnetic North

All my books have missing pages
now fastened to the plaster,
or grafted onto my skin:
mile markers and compass needles both—
the snapped branch
that can put you on my trail
if you care to follow me
through the brush
and the thicket

Don’t worry:

I’ve cleared the thorn bushes,

laid planks across streams,

and built bridges over

roaring rivers

You’ll need to be running

at full bore
to leap frog

super-highways
that stretch serpentine—
mountains high,
valley's low

Pick your way through the decades,

I’ve a route mapped for you:

I know it intimately,

been there and back too many times!

Yeah, I'm living whole lifetimes over here

three or four at a go!

Even so,

when you tell me—sometimes—
that you'd like to take a look, sometime

I have to steady my breath

like it was my very first time

So I need you to hurry, just this once

and I don't care if it's only curiosity

that finally wins out.
I don't need to see your calculus:

You are here!

Unbutton my shirt and travel overland

the length of my spine—
Seine to Seville

Woodstock to these city streets

You are right here
and I bet you stay all night.

---

My good friend Megan S., herself a really engaging writer and phenomenal poet, offered a constructive critique. Here's some of what she sent:

[referring to the poem's beginning] ...the words link up and do something nice, but i feel like they need more anchoring.

...there [are] so many great phrases like "stretch serpentine" and "pick your way" even though i wish the pick your way part were more visceral. yeah, maybe that's it. the poem starts laying itself down like [particular] train tracks and then around the middle it seems to become these [other, though similar] train tracks you are aware of having imagined and you start going, well this is what else is in my head...and i just want more train tracks to lead to the calculus part which is for sure more steel and bolts. and the end is the last bang of that hammer, which is great, i love that couplet.

Do you think I addressed these concerns without fundamentally altering the original piece (posted below)? Also, any other perspectives out there? I would very much appreciate the commentary!