The Cartographer's Hands

My grandfather drew coastlines from what sailors told him at dusk — the shape of absence where land ends, the cold grammar of waves.

He never saw the sea himself. Just ink, and the rumors of water, and his hands moving like something certain across the pale field of paper.

I think of all the places I have loved by hearsay, by the smell of someone else's coat — cities lifted whole from borrowed photographs, a river I know only by its name in a song.

The maps he made were wrong in small ways. A bay where no bay opened. A cape that had been worn to nothing decades before his pen touched it.

Still, ships went out by those lines and returned, mostly. The errors held a kind of grace — what we draw instead of what we find.