The Cartography of Rain

The first drops arrive like rumors, darkening the limestone step by step until the whole terrace speaks in a tongue we almost recognize.

Somewhere a gutter begins its low hymn, a thread of water finding the groove worn by every storm before it— the stone remembers what we keep forgetting.

Children press their palms to windows and watch the garden rearrange itself, each leaf tipping its collected weight into the next leaf down, a cascade of small surrenders.

By evening the rain has drawn its map: puddles chart the low places, the cracks we stepped over all summer now rivers with their own convictions, their own tributaries of light.

And when it stops, the silence is not silence but the earth drinking the last of it in, the worms rising to taste what the clouds let go.