What the Cartographer Left Out

There are places a map refuses to name — the field where the road bends for no reason, where the soil still holds the shape of a house.

She drew the coastline in a single stroke, confident as a surgeon, leaving out the coves where the tide comes in soft and does not leave.

The legend explains nothing about smell, nothing about the hour when the light goes the color of old brass and the shadows forget where they belong.

I have carried this map for years and found it wrong in every useful way — the mountains shorter than I feared, the distances longer than I'd hoped, the town I was looking for renamed, or gone.

What survives the cartographer's hand is only contour, only the broad arithmetic of land — not the woman at the window, not the particular blue of that particular morning, not the fact that I stood there once and did not know to stay.