in love as in tourism

I spend a lot of time on Poetry Foundation during National Poetry Month, and this poem kept showing up on the front page, highlighted as one of the new poems in the most recent issue of Poetry magazine. I've been coming back to it all month, and I like it more each time.

cartography seems the strangest science today
as morning alters the fittings of the hour to form
shapes wholly new. wishing I did not know that, to leave,
it is down and right past the neighbor’s potted palm,
across the street to meet the river, then ahead until
the train station crowds into view—I search the infinity
enclosed here, for any time that the future could spare.
between the words lost and losing entire worlds change
hands. where the latter informs negation the other is
duplicitous with potentialities—becoming something
even desired. suddenly one is alert to all the colors
returned to sight by merely looking, a lack of familiarity
striking the common into curiosity, just as in the folktales
in which death plays detective, the wanderer is the one
who evades the blade. it is so wonderful to not be found
but to be finding, as I discover in tokyo—whose streets
resemble labyrinth, pierced with rhododendron in spring
and thundering gingko in autumn—and remember again
when you laugh and I do not ask why. and I do not want
to know either, to whom this room belonged to before us,
or where that smell of fruit is coming from, or why a fog
rises to challenge the knowledge of places once intimately
kept. I am grateful that within you only the unknown lives,
that even as what passes between us is frail and limited
and human, we still dream of things resembling the eternal.

—Xiao Yue Shan, "in love as in tourism," originally published in Poetry, April 2021.