Cartography of the Kettle

The kettle maps its small weather of steam, coiling up like a story remembered mid-sentence, a soft longitude between morning and noon.

On the counter, bread cools to a pale moon, its crust whispering of fields it never saw, while knives lie still, bright as unspent rain.

I listen for the house settling its bones, for pipes that tick like distant metronomes, for a sparrow testing the edges of the eaves.

In this room, time is a careful pour: tea darkening, windows brightening, the day unrolling its quiet atlas.