Orbit of a Rain Engine

The field wakes with a bruise of heat, wind unspools like a ribbon from a spool of bone, and the rain engine clears its throat— a small metal planet in the barn roof.

It drinks the sky one rusted cup at a time, hinges singing where swallows nest; down in the gutters, leaves rehearse their paper fall.

Inside, the engine keeps a map of every storm, a library of droplets, each a glass seed; it hums when thunder passes overhead, as if translating the language of distance.

Night lowers its ladder of moths. The machine listens, and the fields reply, wet syllables on tin, on soil, on skin— an orbit completed in the dark.