The Cartography of Rain

There is a country the rain invents each afternoon — its borders drawn in puddles on the asphalt, its rivers running quick along the curb toward some parliament of drains.

I have walked its provinces with wet shoes and no umbrella, learning the dialect of gutters, the way a downspout conjugates the verb to fall.

Whole cities rise in the streaked glass of bus shelters — their citizens brief, translucent, leaning into wind that smells of iron and torn leaves.

By evening the country dissolves. The pavement dries in patches like a map losing its coastlines, and I stand at the corner holding the memory of a nation

that existed fully, that held its own elections, sang its anthems in the key of thunder — then left nothing but the clean scent of after.