Unmapped

A poem from the archives

“Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”
—Wallace Stegner

We were floating by fast when it caught us,
Gave us a place to anchor, and watched us
Begin to call our home into being.
All we needed for it we brought with us,
So it left us to it, and before we knew it,
We were cemented together here,
Securely as the roots of the mountains.

I wonder where you came from and
Where you might have gone without me.
I wonder what great ships you could
Have beached somewhere else, though who knows
What our children’s children might see
Come to pass right here, in this place
Where we’ve been set, accreting life.

A little carbon and calcium
Is all it takes to move heaven and earth
Around ourselves and find a niche that works,
Amid vast, acidifying oceans.
But of all the polyps in all the reefs
In all the world, just this spot was prepared
For your unmapped geography of hope.

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I wrote this five years ago (original here—this version shifts the speaker’s perspective in the first stanza), and over time have come to see it as a poem about and for my wife and our marriage.

Today is our 19th anniversary, and I feel it as strongly as ever. Some things are too strong for prose, too bright to say directly. Praise God for metaphor and verse and the emotional music of language.