The Cartography of Rust

There are countries inside the gate latch, continents of oxide spreading where a thumb once pressed down hard to enter the yard in the dark.

Rain has drawn its own borders here, patient diplomats of weather negotiating the surrender of every steel thing we abandoned to the open air.

I found a bicycle chain wearing a fur of copper-green, each link a vertebra of some animal that chose to fossilize standing up.

The drainpipe keeps its journal in a language of flaking skin, each page thinner than the last, until what holds the water is only the memory of holding.

And I think this is how it works— not the collapse, but the slow agreement between iron and rain that nothing was ever meant to stay the shape we gave it.