The Cartographer of Breezes

In the morning I chart the wind with a pencil of smoke, its graphite turning over the river, soft as a gull's wing. Traffic keeps time like a slow metronome of light, and the air writes itself across my sleeves.

A boy releases a paper kite, a small treaty with height; it trembles, then steadies, a compass in the palm of a string. At the corner café the steam rises in thin blue stairs, each step a quiet address the day refuses to keep.

By noon the boulevard is a harp, strung with heat, and every parked car hums with its own trapped sun. I note how the trees exhale, green and mineral, the city briefly becoming a lung of varnished leaves.

When evening cools the asphalt, the map loosens, ink running back to the bottle of dusk. I fold the page into my pocket, still damp with weather, and walk home under a sky that keeps rewriting my name.