ISSUE: Fall 2008
The Plat Book
cast our farm
and neighbors’
farms as flat,
our last names
spattered across
their scant
shapes in slant
caps, our land-
scape cropped
and spiral-bound.
I found I could
leaf through
miles of ground
in a snap, from
town to town-
ship and hilltop
to millpond,
every dotted
logging lane
and back-alley
kink in plain
black ink hand-
plotted. To think
what thought’d
gone into that
odd elevation!
To me it was a
revelation that
the land could
be recorded and
recorded free
of all topography,
distorted by
the tax man’s
idiosyncratic
iconography.
For this was
his, not our Eau
Claire County.
Ours had airy
view and hue
and landmarks,
oaks and willows
and windmills
and cattle in it.
No, we couldn’t
have survived
a minute
on that non-soil,
an O where our
un-drawn
house and barn
and all our toil
would go.
