The Cartographer's Last Shore

She drew coastlines from memory, curving each peninsula the way a tongue shapes a name no one else remembers.

The sea refused her measurements. It kept revising itself at dusk, swallowing the sandbars she'd marked in red, returning other things— a boot, a bottle, a child's wooden horse.

She pressed her ear to the paper and heard the old inland rivers moving beneath everything, patient as debt, older than any border she'd ever drawn.

In the end she left the margins blank, let them fill with salt and tide-wrack, the particular silence of places that exist only in the going toward them, never in the arriving.