The Bellman’s Memoir

I can’t remember my first map.

A National Geographic 

Tip-in, perhaps, since my parents

Had a magazine subscription 

That over the years filled a hall

With stacks and stacks of yellow backs,

Although we lost most of the maps.

It could have been a Triple-A

Road map used for a vacation.

No. I think earlier than that.

Maybe one of the little maps

In our Encyclopedia,

Another subscription monster

That took up a couple of shelves.

Or maybe an illustration

In an early children’s Bible—

The problem is that all the maps

I can conjure from memories

Are compound congeries of blurs,

Each fused image a type of map.

I can’t focus tighter than that.

After imagery, comment—

That’s the way this works in old poems,

By which I mean really old poems,

Hundreds or thousands of years old.

If the best images of maps

I can recall are generic,

My commentary has to be.

They’re nostalgic technology 

Now, any kind of paper map,

Categorized with fountain pens,

Blackboards, manual typewriters.

You can buy coffee-table books

Full of imaginary maps

Invented for invented worlds,

But nostalgia and invention

Are too present, too specific.

Memory, mother of all maps,

Is more honest and dissembling—

Maps’ imprecise comparisons

Preserving and linking patterns

Served her fundamental functions.

Maps emerged from our minds to search

As infinitesimals search—

Fine-tuning approximations

To the world expanding from us—

But the more that they fit this world,

The less that they resembled us.

Like children and trained hawks, they grew

Increasingly reliable,

Until they got away from us

And then—like all our memories,

However well-pegged to known names,

To every rock in the landscape,

To every cherished monument

And experience—betrayed us.