The Cartography of Rain

A storm crosses the valley like a hand drawn slowly over a map, each ridge answering with its own shade of silence, and the river below turns the color of something almost remembered.

I have watched whole afternoons dissolve into the particular gray that gathers between hills — not fog, not cloud, but the breath of earth cooling against the underside of sky.

The rain arrives without announcement, stitching the air to the grass, and for a moment every surface holds a trembling cartography of where the water chose to land.

Later the sun will lay its instruments across the wet stone, measuring what the storm left behind — a changed topography, faintly steaming, the meadow rinsed down to its greens.