The Cartography of Rain

The first drops arrive like rumors, tapping the dust awake on a country road where no one has walked since Tuesday.

Each puddle becomes a lens — the sky inverted, oak branches swimming in a shallow heaven we could shatter with one step.

By afternoon the gutters speak in tongues of aluminum and gravel, carrying the hill's red confession down to the storm drain's open mouth.

I once tried to map the sound of it, tracing every pitch against the roof tiles, the porch railing, the hood of a parked car, but rain refuses cartography — it keeps redrawing the borders of silence.

When it stops, the world is someone else's, scrubbed and glistening, almost new, and the earthworms lie on the sidewalk like small pink questions no one remembers asking.