The Cartographer's Last Survey

She draws the coastline from memory now, the inlet where the herons stood like gray punctuation, where the tide wrote and erased its name each morning.

Her instruments have gone quiet in their cases. The theodolite's eye clouded long ago, but the hand still knows the slight declension of a shoreline pulling toward the south.

Every map she made was an argument against forgetting — the creek that tasted of iron after rain, the ridge where the air changed from pine to something older, unnamed.

What she renders now is not the land but what the land was when she first stood in it, young, uncertain, the compass needle trembling between two equal truths.

The paper absorbs the lines and holds them. Outside, the actual shore continues its slow revision, unaware it is being remembered this precisely.