The Cartographer's Last River

She drew the river from memory, her hand trembling at the bend where the alders leaned in like old men who'd forgotten what they were waiting for.

The blue she used was not water— it was the hour before the water, the held breath of upstream, everything the current would carry before it learned to let go.

At the edge of the paper she stopped, lifted her pen. The river, she knew, had moved east by now, or dried to salt grass, or was flowing in someone else's dream.

She left the delta unfinished. Let the white page decide where land ends, where the sea swallows what names we gave it— all that careful ink, all that longing.