Cartography of Forgetting

The river has moved again. You can tell by the dry crescent it left— pale mud cracked into a map of itself, a record of the water's last address.

My grandmother's voice was like that once, holding the shape of everything it touched: the names of streets in a city that renamed itself, the precise weight of a pomegranate in November.

Now I find her in the wrong rooms, calling me by her sister's name as if time were a house where all the doors open onto childhood.

I am learning to read the dry crescents. The way a face holds the ghost of the face it was. The way a word, half-said, contains the whole country of its meaning.

Something is always moving on. Something is always leaving its cracked map behind, saying: here, once, was water— and the water was cold, and it ran clear, and it sang.