For this week’s Poetry Rehab Task (Skin) http://maraeastern.com/2015/05/25/poetry-101-rehab-skin/ I am reposting this prose-poem I wrote over 25 years ago and first submitted for Writing 201 Poetry Course Assignment 7 – Fingers. It is also included in a book of prose-poems written a quarter of a century ago that I am attempting to publish through Amazon’s createspace.com. I would greatly appreciate any advice on this process.

 

Your Freckles

These dots of melanin occur quite without evident or reasonable order. Refreshing moles intermittently punctuate swathes of otherwise desert skin; do not blemish but accentuate its softness. Their magnitudes vary greatly: some are large and a very chocolate brown; others almost infinitesimal points of blond pigment, barely visible to the naked eye. Some constellate into large formations; two or more coalesce into binary or more complex systems; some, solitary, command huge expanses of unpigmented skin.

The surface of each human body is a largely uncharted firmament. The larger moles are not blessed with names of gods not otherwise worshipped. Unseen lines and patterns are not drawn between them, drawing legends from their random distribution. The volume of the human body is not drawn on rectilinear sheets overlaid with a navigable network of co-ordinates.

Being such unmapped surfaces, is it no wonder, we each feel so alone and uncared for; and so much the outsider in the world of others? If we learnt to be one another’s cartographers, love would not then be blind and intangible.

How dare the cosmologists have plotted the beginning and the end of time when each one of our terrestrial bodies lies uncharted! How dare men’s boots have imprinted the moon’s dusty craters, when my fingers have not traced imaginary lines between your freckles!