The Cartographer's Last River

She mapped every river but one— the one that ran beneath her sleep, unnamed, carrying the silt of half-spoken things.

Her compass needle bent toward it the way old grief bends toward anything still and gleaming.

She drew coastlines from memory, the inlet where her father's voice went quiet, the delta that opened like a hand releasing what it could not keep.

In the margins she wrote: *here the water argues with the stone.* In the margins she wrote: *here the herons know nothing of border.* She left the center of the page a white she never filled.

Now someone else will find the atlas and wonder at the gap, that unmeasured place, its blankness asking: what were you afraid the river would show you about yourself?