What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

There is a valley the mapmakers skipped, where the river bends twice like a question and the grass remembers every boot that crossed it.

My grandmother kept such a place behind her left eye, I think— somewhere the light arrived slant and stayed. She never described it, only touched the window when the angle was right.

The cartographer's hand trembled once and left a smear across the mountain range, and everyone agreed to call it cloud. Now hikers climb toward that smudge expecting altitude, finding instead the particular silence of mistakes.

I have my own unmapped corridor— a hallway between sleeping and waking where I can still hear the specific creak of a door that was torn out in 1997. Sound outlasts its source. The map outlasts the territory.

What we failed to name does not disappear. It pools in the body's low places, rises in the throat at odd hours, surfaces as weather no forecast predicted.