Epithalamion

And now, after the night that follows this day of promise and abandon, you will
wake to a life that is no different and yet is called something else and so, in the
way names carry history, tales, associations and song, you wake to each other
differently.

May you wake each day glad of each other.

May you keep the small and daily preferences of coffee, soap brand, sock style
and music specific to the hour for each other. May they be attended and
considered.

Consider the luck of having another's joys and sorrows woven through yours, your
simple melody made harmony.

And how harmony thrills us as it resolves from dissonance.

There will be dissonance. The unpoetic daily and the vast tragic. And there
will be time for that rough burr to become texture, knots in raw silk.

Now, there are knottings of the face, quirks and tics of expression—a word, a
way the cup is held, a hitch in sleep's regular breath—that are bright points in
your maps of each other.

Remember the star-maps have held their constellations for years beyond counting
and no one finds such unchangingness dull or grating.

We use the familiar points and stories to figure where we are. To find our way
home across vast distances that cannot be mapped before they are traveled.