What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The map ends where the river bends into a stand of larch no surveyor thought worth the ink.

My grandmother knew that bend — called it the place where the water forgets it is only passing through.

She named things the way children do: by what they looked like in one particular light, at one hour that never returned.

The larch are still there, I suppose, burning gold each October whether anyone watches or not.

I keep the map anyway, its white margin a kind of faith — that the unnamed goes on being.