I am all of them, and none of them, at once: Hudson and Columbus, Vespucci and Verrazzano, Magellan and Raleigh; Amundsen, too, and Scott and Peary, Heyerdahl and Hillary. You are the globe, the unknown waters; and I will test and chart you.

I use all the instruments at my disposal: eyes, fingers, legs, lips, teeth: all are necessary to assay the terrain, determine the best approach, bend time and space to my will, conquer the unconquerable. While my hands map equatorial regions, my mouth goes to work on the ranges of the north. My teeth bite down on the rosy peak of Kilimanjaro: your cry and arched back fetch another nip, and my fingers detect the increased flow of sap to the south.

My hands enjoy their work, moving with the rhythm of the rivers, here and there making landfall and mapping every tributary. The earthy, musky, tropical perfume hangs everywhere, even at the polar regions, until the individual and discrete palpations suffuse into one.

The ground shakes and quivers, shock-waves rising everywhere, until the whole collapses in a paroxysm of noise and subtle movement, a new and different kind of seismic activity. The convulsion subsumes everything around, pulling separate bodies together before it explodes again: the cosmic Big Bang on a human scale.