What the Cartographer Left Out

The old map ends at the river's second bend, past which only a white margin remains, clean as forgetfulness, as snow before footsteps.

She traced the road with her thumbnail until the paper thinned to translucency— all those towns she had never reached pressed flat into names.

Somewhere in the unmapped country her grandmother had kept bees, had known each hive by the pitch of its hum, a low theology of honey and wing.

Now the granddaughter drives through the unnamed hills at dusk, the window letting in the green smell of rain, and cannot say why her throat tightens—

only that the land keeps folding around her like a letter written once, then read so often the creases have become the words.