The Cartography of Rain

The first drops arrive like rumors, darkening the limestone step by step until the whole courtyard speaks in a tongue older than the house.

I watch from a window I cannot name— not kitchen, not bedroom, but somewhere the glass remembers every storm it has held back.

The gutters carry their freight downstream, leaves and bottle caps and the small bright casualties of wind, and the street becomes a river that knows only one direction.

By evening the rain has drawn a map of everywhere it has been: the runnels in the garden wall, the stain beneath the eave, each puddle a country with its own sky.

When it stops, the silence is so complete I can hear the earth drinking, slow and deliberate, the way the living take what the living need.