What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

At the edge of the known world someone drew a mountain range in pencil, then erased it — the ghost still rises, pale ridgeline pressed into paper.

The rivers have names but the silences between them do not. I have walked those silences barefoot, counting the stones, learning the grammar of unmarked places.

My grandmother folded her grief like a map she meant to return to — the creases held longer than the roads, longer than the towns the roads once served.

What we refuse to name persists anyway: the field that swallowed the orchard, the hour that swallowed the field, the light that keeps arriving from that hour.

Every cartographer dies leaving blanks. The apprentice fills them in with sea serpents, with warnings, with the honest admission: here is where I ran out of language.