Sleeping Beauties is the name cartographers give blank spaces.

Spring runoff from the Sangres fills the river.

Geese return. The world warms up.

You push and pull oars, use the current

for navigation, take in stone’s quiet,

sleep deeply on grassy shelves.

I follow you into the gorge.

An explorer, you leave

the excavated and the mapped,

content with this red-yellow curve,

sandstone passage between this moment

and the next.