The Cartographer of Small Hours

Before the house remembers it is a house, before the radiator ticks its morse of heat, I map the room by what I cannot see— the dresser's edge, the lamp's cold stem, the body's knowledge older than its name.

There are hours that belong to no one, unlit corridors between one day and the next where the mind unbraids itself like river grass and thoughts come loose and easy, soft as sediment that never meant to settle.

I have stood at the window and watched a fox cross the yard like a sentence that forgets where it was going, and felt, briefly, that I too had no obligation to arrive.

The dark is its own cartography— pressure and absence, the negative space of everything the light insists upon. I fold it into me each time I wake and carry it, unnamed, into the day.