What the Cartographer Left Out

The old map names the river twice— once in ink, once in a crease where someone folded it toward home.

The mountain range is wrong by thirty miles. Whoever walked it knew this, kept walking anyway, trusting the land over the legend.

There are towns here with no roads leading in, only a dot, a name in small capitals, the mapmaker's polite concession to the fact that people lived somewhere he had never been.

I have been drawing you this way— marking the shore where I imagine you standing, leaving the interior blank, labeled in the old cartographer's shorthand: here there be.

DONE