What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps show rivers that have moved, towns named for men whose grandchildren changed the spelling, a coastline drawn before the sea learned what it wanted.

My grandmother kept one folded in her apron pocket — not for navigation, she said, but to remember the shape of a place before it knew it was being looked at.

I have tried to map her hands. The blue vein that ran from knuckle to wrist like a tributary no one named. The way flour stayed in the creases long after the dough was given away.

Somewhere between the surveyor's notations and the actual ground, the sparrows live — unbothered by the legend, building nests in the margins of everything we thought we had measured.

The cartographer leaves out the grief of standing in a place that has been accurately rendered and finding it, still, beyond you — the coordinates exact, the distance, inexact.