What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps end at the forest's edge with a notation in cramped Latin — here the surveyors turned back.

What they couldn't measure still exists: the way light falls at four in October, the smell of iron in the creek where my grandfather waded, slow as a heron.

I have stood in his silence and felt the country shift beneath me — not earthquake, but the softer upheaval of a name no longer answered.

Now the satellites have mapped every acre. The forest is a green polygon, the creek a blue thread with no Latin margin. Nothing left unmeasured, nothing unknown — only the unmappable, still undisclosed.