The Cartographer's Last Survey

She draws the coastline from memory now, the inlet where the heron stood each morning like a question the tide never answered.

Her pen makes the river wider than it was, or maybe it was always that wide and she had been looking at it wrong, standing too close, measuring in grief.

The mountains she renders as rumor— blue suggestions at the page's edge, the way the dead become approximate in us, softened by the distance we survive.

What she cannot map: the sound of her father's boots on the porch stairs, the particular weight of late August, a dog's name that keeps arriving in her throat without warning.

She rolls the paper carefully. Somewhere, the actual shore goes on being exact about itself, unbothered by what she remembers.