The Cartographer's Last Draft

She draws the coastline from memory now, the harbor where her father kept his nets, the sandbars that swallowed the light at dusk like something learning to be still.

The ink dries different in this country. She presses harder than she means to, leaves grooves in the paper that read like braille in the other room.

What she cannot map: the smell of low tide carried inland on a Thursday, or the particular green of bottle glass worn smooth by the same water that erased the dock.

She folds the map along its rivers, tucks the mountains into their valleys. Some distances, she has learned, remain true only when the paper is closed.

At the window the light is doing what light does— insisting on the present tense, falling across her hands, her unfinished work, each crease a meridian she will not cross again.