"The Archaeoastronomer Considers the Intrinsic Error in the First Compass She Brought to the Menhir" by T.D. Walker

"The compass is a very simple, relatively cheap and pocket-sized instrument, which works without any specific preparation, under any atmospheric conditions, and as such it should be an inseparable companion for any archaeoastronomer.  It allows us, in particular, to have a first snapshot of the orientations on a site. What is more, if used with due caution, it can also be employed for scientific surveys." -- Archaeoastronomer Giulio Magli, Archaeoastronomy: Introduction to the Science of Stars and Stones

At first, god was a direction

we were pulled toward.  Like a needle

demagnetized or too strongly drawn

toward what we'd thought was north.

What is north?  An agreement like a marriage, or

names for places we'd thought we'd been.  Reversed

polarity is like that, when you're too near a temple

disguised as exactitude.  What becomes a lodestone

can tear the bond between what makes us

face the direction we seek and what we want to find--

Lodestones correct and addle.  Don't forget that

you have to know the compass is wrong

before you can fix it.  You have to know which direction 

we've all agreed north to be.  A monument on Earth,

broken, becomes a cardinal point on the Moon.

When we look at it from the Lunar Colony's observation

window, will we see what its creator want us to see?

Or will we discover that gods, small and intimate, our own

split and chip, are not a direction at all?  This way 

of obscuring some passage, some break in the year, of mourning 

what mysteries we've lost--

T.D. Walker is the author of the poetry collections Small Waiting Objects (CW Books, 2019), Maps of a Hollowed World (Another New Calligraphy, 2020), and Doubt & Circuitry (Southern Arizona Press, 2023). She hosts and curates poetry programs for shortwave radio, most recently Line Break. Find out more at https://www.tdwalker.net