The Problem With Rectangular States
(Day 3 of the Poem-A-Day in April 2009 exercise)
Laziness! Pure and simple sloth.
You see it growing, east to west.
The hardy Pilgrims and parolees and peers
Who landed first and found the land
In fractal primal unconquered hardness
Were willing to abide by what the landscape gave.
North by East, it seems the land claimers
Had more localized demands: small and manageable,
But bounded by nature’s boundaries,
And thus irregular and oddly shaped,
Lovely, unique constructions.
Moving South, the scope was broader,
Or else the map-makers grew weary of much detail.
And mathematics began to raise its ugly head,
Lines of latitude marking the southern edges of states.
On the western verge, still rivers and mountains
Decided the territorial limits.
Massachusetts was the first to hint at squareness,
Certainly its bounds are linearesque.
But the eye need go no further than Pennsylvania
To see the seed of sloth that blossoms heading west.
Who knew Quakers were closet Pythagoreans?
And from this seed, neighboring Ohio strives
For squarity, thwarted only by the river and the lake.
Tennessee’s parallelogram lies flatly over
The increasing rectangularity of the Deep South.
Cross the Mississippi, and there’s a sort of pause
In the square wave that’s been building.
But rhomboid Arkansas and almost square Iowa
Point to the inevitability waiting next door.
You can just see the territorial dividers,
With compass and ruler, manfully considering
Rivers and Rockies, some differentiation,
But finding none, And then looking up,
They say, “It’s lunchtime, screw it,
Make them all boxes, let’s get out of here.”
Laziness squares up the map until the obstinacy
Of the Pacific forces fractal reality back onto the atlas.
Lazy cartography, the bane of maps made by man.
Manifest Destiny meets TGIF work ethic.
I guess no one thought it would get this big.
© 2009 Chuck Puckett
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