What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

At the edge of the surveyed world the mapmaker's pen hesitated— a valley folded into itself like a letter never sent.

The rivers there had no names, only the low argument of water against stone, the kind of patience that outlasts everything it touches.

She marked it with a small circle, the cartographer's shorthand for doubt, and moved on toward the coast where the horizon at least had a name.

Years later someone crossed it, found nothing remarkable— just light on sedge grass, the same light, she imagined, falling into no one's eyes.

The circle remains on the map. The valley remains unmeasured. Between the two: the ordinary miracle of what continues without being known.