What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

There are places on old maps where the hand faltered— a peninsula that trails off into margin, a river drawn in two strokes that do not meet. The cartographer knew he could not stay long enough to finish.

My grandmother kept a tin of buttons sorted by color, not by garment. She could not tell you which coat each one came from, only that she had kept them in case something needed mending.

I think of the unnamed inlets, the bays where storms waited without anyone to call them into being. How much of the world exists only in the act of looking.

She is gone now, and the buttons scatter in my memory like unmoored islands. I try to place them on some interior shore but the hand keeps faltering— a coastline that refuses to resolve.

What I know of grief is this: the map continues past the edge of the paper. Somewhere beyond the last drawn line there is water, and weather, and distance no instrument has learned to measure.