Nowhere

On Being Off the Map
And Explaining Where We Live to UPS

Hidden to the average eye,
We live inside the secret sky,
Fields and valleys screened from view,
Noticed by the chosen few,
Wreathed in mists and sudden fogs,
Unseen behind our fallen logs,
Burrowed in our cloak-and-dagger hills,
Sheltered lithely by the daffodils,
Even adverbs disappear:
“There” is somehow absent here,
And nouns themselves are scared to roam
In our verbal catacomb—
The sight itself is out of tune
In cartographic Brigadoon,
Where what optics seem to verify
The myopic powers of the state deny.