What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps showed towns that no longer answer to those names, roads that ended where the surveyor got tired, a river whose bend shifted one winter without asking anyone's permission.

My grandmother kept one folded in the bread drawer, the creases worn pale as scar tissue, and she would trace her finger along the ghost of a village the way you press a bruise to feel where you still are.

What the cartographer left out: the smell of rain on chalk, the particular silence after a bell stops, the way a kitchen can hold a woman long after she has gone from it.

I have been drawing my own maps lately— approximate, full of erasures, the scale shifting between what I remember and what I can bear to name.

All maps are elegies in disguise. They say: here was something. Here, once, a person stood and looked out and thought: I should mark this down.