What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps name things that no longer exist — a mill, a ford, a woman's maiden name pressed into the hillside like a thumb. Someone once thought these worth preserving.

I have walked the field where the mill stood. The grass has no opinion about the wheel. Water still moves beneath the earth there, finding its old channels in the dark.

We name places after what we did to them, after the wound or the harvest, the burning, never after what the land was thinking when we arrived with our fires and our children.

And still the rivers keep their older names — sounds borrowed from mouths that are centuries gone, syllables worn smooth as river stones from being carried so long inside the throat.

The new maps are accurate and cold. They show the road, the gradient, the tower. They do not show the way the light fails across a field at the end of October, or what it costs to leave a place for good.