The Cartographer's Insomnia

She maps the rooms her father walked through, measuring doorways by the width of his shoulders, marking the kitchen window where morning came in at an angle and called his name.

The legend grows unwieldy— symbols for the smell of sawdust, for the particular silence after rain, for the way a house forgets you before you are finished leaving.

She draws the garden from memory, places the fig tree three feet closer to the fence than it ever stood, because that is where it lives in the country she is making.

Each night she corrects the coastline, erases whole harbors, redraws the mouths of rivers. The land she is charting has no fixed meridian. It moves toward her the way water moves into the shape of whatever holds it.

By morning the map is someone else's— accurate, useless, complete. She folds it along the seams of what she cannot keep and begins again.