Roads Without Names

My old boyfriends always had to hike
on roads without names.

They wore muddy boots,
had me reeling like a compass.

We picnicked on some crumbling wall
where the Picts or Celts

buried their wives in summer silt:
they, too, had no names.

One told me about a souterrain
on Station Island—
Caverna Purgatory—
they say is the mouth to hell

and he dragged his fingers on my palm
to chart our course:

a rhumb line across the Highlands,
by way of Canaan,
then we’ll meet in the lowlands.

II.
I lost their names somewhere there,
on the old Roman road, but remember when I see doors

without walls, walls over graves, the valley terra firma
where we slept.

Young explorers minted with Dr. Bronner’s soap:
you live for the
the downward descent,
on stone, over bone.

Now we're old, like Mercator maps,
and our shoes are clean.