What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The old maps left blank spaces at the edges, not from ignorance but from a kind of honesty— a white admission that the world keeps going past the trembling of the hand.

I have done the same with you. Left the coastline of those last months undrawn, the shoreline I approached then turned from, oars still dripping.

Somewhere a surveyor marks a hill she climbed alone before anyone had named it. The act of naming is also the act of loss: the thing becomes the word, then only that.

What I remember is the quality of light through the window over your shoulder, the way it made the table pale and warm, a country I did not think to record.

Now I would draw it carefully. Now I would take the measurements.