What the Cartographer Left Out

The map shows the river but not the year it flooded, not the cottonwood that split its trunk leaning toward the water like a man unwilling to leave.

My grandmother folded the atlas back along its old creases, always the same way, as if the world had decided which roads deserved to be remembered.

There are places I have stood that no legend accounts for— the field where the barn had been, its absence louder than timber, the grass grown strange with forgetting.

A cartographer draws the coast but not the pull of it, not the cold that enters the hands when you hold something true for the last time.

What persists: a single road, unnamed, leading inland toward hills the map calls empty. I have been to those hills. I would not call them that.