Cartography of Rain

The first drops arrive like rumors, darkening the stone in archipelagos that spread and merge until the whole street speaks in a single tongue.

I have watched rain erase a hillside, pull the colors down to ochre, turn a vineyard into something older than its vines — the land before anyone pressed a name into its soil.

There is a cartography to this: the way water finds the crease in every surface, maps the low places we forgot we carved by walking the same path each morning.

A gutter fills and empties with the sound of someone shuffling papers in another room. The ordinary keeps its music hidden until the weather changes.

By evening the clouds have thinned to gauze, and the streets return their borrowed light. Everything gleams with the brief, unnecessary beauty of a world that has just remembered itself.