THE SURVEYOR Poem by Rutger Kopland

It isn't mere indifference, in a certain sense
it is perhaps even love that drives him on,
there's no paradise without its steward.

He is happy with his landscape, but even happier
with searching, co-ordinates point him to his invisible
spot, the map, not the world, is his Utopia.

He wants to know where he is, but it's his consolation
to know that the spot where he is standing exists only
as his private formula, he is a hole in the shape of

a man in the landscape. With the boundaries that he draws,
sharper, more distinct, the grass and the trees grow
vaguer and everything that lives, declines and dies.

The world around him is perfectly clear, everything has been observed.