What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

There are rivers on old maps that no longer run where the ink says. Someone drew them from hearsay, a traveler's palm pressed to paper before the glacier retreated.

I think of her the same way— a contour line I keep tracing over terrain that has shifted, the elevation wrong, the legend missing its key.

What survives a person is not the person but the shape they left in softer things: the indentation in a pillow, a footpath through grass that still remembers weight.

The cartographer named every inlet except the one he loved, as if silence could preserve it better than any word he knew how to draw.