The Cartographer's Last Season

She spent forty winters drawing coastlines that would not hold still, the sea always revising her margins in salt.

By spring the inlets had migrated north, whole spits of land dissolved where children once filled jars with crabs.

She learned to love the error — the ghost peninsula in pencil, the bay that existed only in the Tuesday of a particular tide.

Maps lie honestly, she said. They fix what moves, name what has no name, give form to the long argument between water and earth.

When she died they found her last notebook full of blank pages, each one labeled simply: here.