The Apprenticeship of Rust

The gate hinge has been practicing its one slow art for decades, turning itself the color of dried blood, of October, of the earth it was pulled from before the smelter's argument. Iron remembers the mine. Not the way we remember — with narrative, revision, the convenient omissions — but the way a river remembers the sea: by always moving toward it. First the bloom, almost beautiful, a burnt sienna lace across the bolt head. Then the softening, the grain gone open like wood left out in weather, like a conversation that has stopped pretending. What the engineers call failure the metal calls a homecoming. Every oxide a syllable in the long sentence of return, every flake a letter loosened from a word it never chose. And the rain keeps coming, faithful as a language no one has to teach. The iron listens. The iron answers. The iron is almost soil again.