TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

Mapmaking — cartography — isn’t just practical, it’s emotional. Maps show us places that mean something to us — places we’ve lived, places we’ve visited, places we long to see someday. 

I was talking with a friend recently about the two neighborhoods I lived in as a child. The first was called Forest Park East, in Columbus, Ohio. In Forest Park, the roads were all named after trees. I lived on Lilacwood Avenue. My mother was raised in the same neighborhood; her parents lived on Redwood.

The next neighborhood my family moved to was called Freedom Colony. It was built in 1976, the U.S. bicentennial, so the streets are all named after places and battles from the American Revolution. Yes, it’s 1776 in Freedom Colony. My house was on Liberty Lane, and I would ride my bike to visit friends who lived on other side streets and cul-de-sacs: Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and Olde North Church. It’s pretty kitschy, I know, but it makes me smile.

Home is a mythic place as much as a real place. It’s different in our minds than it is on the map. And some of what we remember isn’t on the map at all — the way we felt when we were there, how we spent our time in that place, and who we were with. The emotional cartography of any place is different from its actual cartography. 

Today’s poem takes us to a road far from the speaker’s home. The poet is a veteran who once served as an Army 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in Iraq.

This is a poem by Seth Brady Tucker.

The Road to Baghdad
by Seth Brady Tucker

Is less a road than a floral
collection of spongy and soft
bodies, a gathering of the myriad

colors of nations—burnt umber,
puce, kiln red, olive drab, hot
steel. It is a road that stretches

eternally into the ochre mocha
of the horizon. The road
to Baghdad has its own atmosphere

and sound, so unlike the roads
I have driven in the States—here,
the road is silent but for the pops

and spits of flame where trucks
clutch the bright and colorful
bodies of the unfortunate dead.

The road to Baghdad is like the aftermath
of a Fourth of July parade—streets
littered with the chaos of celebration,

where dyed paper and the bright
hulls of fireworks gather in the gutter.
Sometimes, I look for the road

to Baghdad in old maps or on
the web, but I can never find
it—the distance of time has cleared

it from the record books, has erased
it from everywhere but my mind, and
from the minds of those soldiers who saw

it with me. Today, I awake in the morning
with unexplained scratches on the bridge
of my nose, and I ask my empty room, where

has that road gone? I understand that if there
is no road, then there is no me. But if none
of this ever really happened, how do I awaken

every morning to the sun burning my outline
into the wild asphalt of that beautiful highway?

“The Road to Baghdad” by Seth Brady Tucker from MORMON BOY © 2012 Seth Brady Tucker. Used by permission of the poet.