The Cartographer's Grief

She mapped the distances between things— the river and its far bank, the house and the sound of its name in her mouth.

All winter she measured the cold in degrees of departure, calibrated the silence between words that were never said.

The coastline changes. This is not metaphor. She watched the cliffs give themselves to the sea in pieces, slow and without ceremony.

Now the old charts are useless, their contour lines describing a country that exists only in the archive of the body, in muscle memory, in scar.

She draws new maps with a fine pen— not to find her way back but to prove it was there: the hill, the gate, the particular light of an afternoon that is now nowhere.