Cartography of Rain

The first drops arrive like rumors, tapping the eaves with small, insistent fingers until the whole roof hums a dialect only gutters understand.

Puddles open their brief atlases— each one a country dissolving before the surveyor can name it, borders redrawn by the heel of a boot, by the trembling of a leaf falling face-down.

Somewhere a window left ajar lets the storm annotate a desk: ink bleeds across a letter never sent, and the words, finally, say what they were always trying to say.

The dog sleeps through all of it, twitching in a chase no fence contains. He knows what the rain knows— that the earth will smell different after, that forgetting is its own slow garden.

By evening the clouds have packed their instruments. Light returns low and slant, gilding the ordinary: a gate latch, a cracked pot, the trembling of water still finding its level.