The Cartographer's Last Letter

I have been drawing the same coastline for forty years, each revision a confession— the shore does not hold still.

The inlets I marked with ink the color of old tea have swallowed themselves since Tuesday. A lighthouse my father's father named stands now in the middle of the water, patient, unaware.

What I call the land is a guess I make against the tide. The grid I laid over the world was always a kind of prayer, the straight lines begging the earth to behave.

I think of you when I reach the margins, the places where my instruments grow uncertain and I resort to here be depth, here be the pull of something I cannot calibrate.

You were always just past the edge of the frame. I drew toward you for decades. The map ends where you begin.