The Cartographer's Last Survey

She draws the river twice — once where it ran last spring, once where the bank remembers being wet.

The mountain keeps no copy of its names. She writes them anyway: the local word for shelter, the surveyor's word for obstacle, the child's word, unspellable, for home.

Her pencil finds the contour of a field that will be paved before the ink dries. Elevation does not argue with intention. The numbers stay honest long after the ground forgets.

At dusk she closes the leather case, presses her palm against the cover — all that careful notation, all those distances collapsed now to the warmth of one held thing.

The map is not the land. The land is not the land either, not anymore. Something persists between them, unnamed and accurate.