MY VALENTINE'S DAY POEM?? (published by York University Geography Dept. Journal) THE GEOGRAPHER TO HIS COY MISTRESS (with apologies to Andrew Marvel

by Cesar Polvorosa, Jr.

The geographer my dear, is the best lover in the world.

My mapping skills will show

that every place of you matters.

I can scale your heights and plumb your depths

like no economist or engineer can.

I can turn your arctic wastes into tropical wetlands

and immerse myself

in the runoff of your courses.

I will worship the delightful uneven development

of your peaks and valleys.

I will transform your dormant volcanoes

into raging fountains of fire.

By my compass, my feelings for you are multi-scalar

that no spatial fix can cure.

I have transcended the physical and the human

and the friction of distance to explore our dialectics.

But I am askance when our talk takes the cultural turn.

I had my fill of Bordieu and Foucault

a surfeit of Harvey and Marx

and post-structural realities.

Why am I still at the periphery?

I am a geographer my lady

but I don’t measure coyness in geologic time.

We cannot fiddle over contestable territories

and negotiations of our identities

nor agitate over the spatial division of our labor.

I cannot stop the coming of climate change

nor wait for the continents to drift apart.

Therefore, before space and time themselves are annihilated,

let us create eternity in this habitus

and go where the trajectory of our desires transport us.

Let us revel in the collision

of our tectonic plates,

the agglomeration and the rapturous intersection

of our mutual embeddedness.