Cartography of Forgotten Rivers

The river my grandmother named after herself has no water in it now, only the shape of water — pale stone, the heron's old address, a corridor of willows practicing patience.

She taught me to read the land the way you read a face: the creases where grief has settled, the hollows where joy pooled and evaporated, the raised seams where something broke and healed wrong.

I have been trying to draw that river from memory, but memory gives me only the sound of it — cold, articulate, sure of where it was going in a way I have never been.

The cartographers who made the old maps included rivers they had only heard of. Dashed lines, uncertain edges, the notation *course approximate, floods permitting.*

I think of them, kneeling over vellum with their small fires and their hearsay, drawing the world as they believed it to be — faithful to the absence of what they loved.