The Cartographer's Last Survey

She mapped the river's argument with stone, every oxbow a sentence it revised— the water never finished what it meant, just bent away and started over.

Her instruments were honest about distance. The theodolite would not lie about how far the mountain stood from anything we loved.

She left blank margins at the coast where the sea kept erasing her work, white rectangles like held breath, like the name she kept almost saying.

In the archive now, her notebooks lean together the way old people stand at a window— not looking out, exactly, but not ready yet to turn away.