The Cartography of Rain

The first drops arrive like rumors, tapping the dust awake on the stone path, each one a small, dark coin spending itself against the earth.

By noon the gutters are braiding silver, and the hill behind the house has put on its coat of mist, become a country I half-remember, green and borderless.

I watch the rain draw its map across the windowpane, tributaries joining and dividing, finding channels no cartographer could predict, the glass a country of brief rivers.

Somewhere beneath the lawn the roots are listening, turning their blind faces upward toward the sound of what they need, that low percussion in the soil.

By evening the clouds have spent their entire vocabulary of gray. The air smells of turned earth and something older, like a book left open in an empty room.