What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

In the margins of old maps, the cartographer wrote *here the land forgets itself*— a warning, or a door, depending on the light.

She traced coastlines the way surgeons trace scars: with certainty about the surface, with grief about what lies beneath.

Some rivers she drew twice, once for how they ran in summer and once for where they dreamed of going.

Her apprentice asked why certain valleys bore no names, only a pale wash of ink the color of an overcast November.

She said: *naming is a kind of ending. Leave them blank and they can still become anything the traveler needs.*