Maps & Legends

(In which I, perhaps, give away a little too much about my secret life as a geek.)

Last year, around this time, Baby & I went to Florida for a week. On the flight back I read all of CD Wright's Deepstep Come Shining in, like, an hour, then looked up to see, between the airplane seats in front of me, a girl playing Zelda on her DS.

I remembered hours spent watching my brothers play Legend of Zelda on our NES: the bizarre landscapes, the repetition of generic trees & graves & castles & rocks, the anticipation for each opened chest, the "treasures" that were or were not sensible (a ladder that lets you move horizontally over water), the puzzles, the questing.

The long lines of the book I'd just read & this passing glimpse of a partially recalled game collided & I wrote in a single shot a 4 page poem. I was shaken: for such a long time my poems have been these miniature squares or single lines.

When we got home I borrowed Wind Waker for the GameCube from a friend & convinced Baby to play the game while I watched & made little notes & then wrote these uncharacteristically massive poems about it. I couldn't be more excited about the results of this & have been trying to collect them into a reasonable, if tiny, manuscript. The very first chunk of these little loves have been published in the From section of the new H_NGM_N. Please head on over & check them out.

We are back playing the game after a 5 month hiatus (in which Baby thru-hiked the PCT) & I'm excited to finish the game & perhaps the mss along with it. Additionally, I got Twilight Princess for the Wii (& here I might as well admit: between the two of us, my roommate & I have 2 GameCubes, 2 DSs, a Sega Genesis, a PS II & the Wii. Come on by for any dancing game ever invented.) as a gift & we are slowly working our way into that (tattooed wolves! a spirit world!). Perhaps a new series of Zelda poems is still to come!