What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

She drew the mountains twice — once as they stood, once as they looked from the window of the train that carried her away. They are not the same mountains.

The lake she named for her mother holds a different light in winter, a pewter stillness that asks nothing, and still she could not bring herself to cross it.

I have held her maps for years without knowing what the blank space meant — that pale unlettered margin at the edge where the known world simply stopped.

Some geographies resist measurement. The distance between a house and a home, the topography of what we almost said — these require an instrument not yet invented.

She folded the last map so many times the creases became a country of their own. I have tried to read them. I keep getting lost at the same longitude as before.