What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps name the river but not the heron that stood in it for forty years, one leg lifted like a parenthesis mid-thought.

My grandmother folded distances into her apron pocket— the smell of pine tar and August, the exact pitch of the screen door that told her who was coming home.

No legend for the hollow where two creeks once argued and went quiet. Now the county road runs through it, and the road does not remember.

We keep measuring what remains: miles, elevations, boundaries redrawn. But the cartographer who tried to map the weight of leaving burned every draft before morning.

Some territories only exist in the scale of a single body— the way grief narrows to the size of a doorway you keep standing in, not entering.