What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named the marshes after saints who never set foot in the reeds, whose knees knew only stone floors, whose prayers had no room for herons.

I walked there once with someone who knew which sedges meant water nearby, who pressed a stem between two fingers and read the season like a postal code.

The marsh is still there. The person isn't. The herons continue their low patrols above the unnamed channels, indifferent to what we called them.

I have tried to draw it from memory — the exact width of the path where it narrows, the lean of the one surviving willow — but each draft drifts a little further west.

What we failed to chart keeps moving. The water finds new low places. The sedges grow back taller over everything we thought we'd marked.