What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps show the river where it used to bend — a slow curve like a held breath before the channel was cut straight.

My grandmother walked that bank with shoes that fit wrong, the mud pulling at her heels as though the earth itself was asking her to stay.

Now the oxbow is a field. Soybeans grow in neat rows where the heron stood, its patience a kind of hunger we no longer have names for.

I have stood at the edge of what was water and felt the ground give slightly, still soft with an old allegiance, remembering weight.

What the cartographer left out is how a place keeps grieving long after it has been made useful.