TRACING THE FACE OF THE WORLD

Cinching the girth of the earth between  
the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer,  
the twelve wind heads of Claudius Ptolemy  
blew the gridlines of longitude and latitude  
into a tidy guide for world exploration,  
siphoning an unwieldy sphere onto a flat plane.  

With ink and paper and woodcut replicas,  
ships would set sail, thirteen centuries later,  
having faith in Ptolemy’s Geography.  
They would shrink the unknown spaces into discoveries,  
record with lines and symbols the size of seas  
and continents, while tracing the face of the world. 
 

Copyright 2000, Gayla Chaney 


Gayla Chaney presently lives in Southeast Texas with her husband and 
three sons.  Her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Re:al, Concho River Review, Windhover, Serpentine, Fish Stories, and Switched-On Gutenberg. 

 
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