Cartography of What Remains

After the flood receded, we found the maps had all been wrong — the river had moved its mouth three miles south, and the town we'd grown up naming existed now only in the paper's grain.

My grandmother kept a jar of soil from the yard where her mother died. She never opened it. She said the smell of a place outlives the place itself.

I've been mapping the rooms of houses I no longer enter: the cold brass of a doorknob, a window that swelled shut each August, the particular creak that announced you.

Some cartographers mark the unknown with sea monsters, with warnings. I mark mine with a single contour line — the elevation of your shoulder when you turned away for the last time.

What the flood takes, it also preserves. Somewhere beneath the new river's silt the old roads still run their patient lengths, leading toward kitchens that no longer stand, toward lights someone forgot to turn off.