The Cartographer's Last Survey

She draws the coastline from memory now, the peninsula she walked at seventeen, how the bluffs dropped without warning into the cold argument of the sea.

The ink sets faster than she expects. Every estuary she marks is approximate, a guess dressed in the grammar of precision, the way a name on a grave stands in for something that was never only a name.

She has mapped thirty-seven countries. She knows that borders are agreements holding their breath, that rivers change their minds by century, that the towns she has marked still burn.

In the drawer, the older versions. She does not throw them out. The errors are where she was. The white space where her hand hesitated is also a kind of record.

Tonight she leaves the northern edge unfinished, a ragged margin where the paper ends. Tomorrow she will decide what lives there. Tonight she is content to let it be ocean, or nothing, or both.