The Cartographer's Confession

I have drawn rivers that no longer run in the old direction, bent their names across paper as if naming were a kind of holding.

The delta I charted in blue ink has since swallowed the road, and the village that stood at its mouth speaks now only to herons.

Every map is a letter to the past. I mark the shoreline where it was the morning I arrived with my instruments, and call the lie precision.

What the water takes, I leave blank— not from honesty, but because I have no symbol for the shape of going.

Still I go back each spring with a clean sheet and the same pencil, drawing the coast as I remember it before it learned to forget me.