Cartography of Forgetting

The map no longer names the river where we waded to our knees in August, that cold thread pulling at the ankles like a question no one finished asking.

Somewhere a cartographer erased the ford, redrew the contour lines without us in them, and now the valley holds only its own silence, the grasses bending toward no one's passage.

I have looked for you in the topography of sleep— those ridgelines you walked when the light went sideways, the hollow where the deer stood and did not run, watching us as if we were the strange ones, as if we had wandered in from another century.

What remains is the habit of looking east at dusk, the body's old cartography intact, still navigating by a coastline that has shifted, still arriving at a shore the sea has swallowed.