What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named the rivers after saints and left the marshes blank, a white the eye reads as absence. But nothing is blank. The cattails knew this. The heron knew this, standing in the unlabeled water.

My grandmother kept a atlas from 1943 on the shelf beside the window. Countries dissolved and reformed like weather while she used the same word for the mountain her whole life. The mountain did not mind.

There is a kind of grief that has no borders, that spills across the legend, staining what the mapmaker thought was sea. You find it only when you walk there, when the ground gives unexpectedly under your weight.

I have been drawing myself for years— all the confident lines, the named roads, the villages I intended to visit. And still the marshes stay white. And still the heron lifts, unhurried, out of the frame.