The Cartographer's Last Survey

She mapped the river in winter when the reeds stood like arguments no one had the heart to finish.

Her instruments were honest— they measured distance, not meaning, recorded the bend in the water but not what the water remembered.

By spring the old tributary had chosen a new bed, and all her careful lines described a country that no longer breathed in quite that shape.

She started again with softer pencils. Drew the hills by their shadows first, then the shadows by their hills. At the margins she wrote: here the land is still deciding.

Everything she loved about a place lived in the revision— the smudged shoreline, the corrected name of a road that locals had always called something else.