Cartography of Rain

The evening unrolls a wet atlas over the street, each lane a silver nerve lit by passing headlights, and the gutters carry whole constellations broken into coins of trembling light.

At the bus stop, strangers steam like horses, breath rising, vanishing, returning in pale ribbons; a child presses a palm to the shelter glass and leaves behind a brief, milky country.

Somewhere a train turns, iron singing under bridges, windows full of faces that do not look up; the rain writes and rewrites their names on the dark lacquer of the river.

By midnight the storm has folded itself smaller, only the eaves still speaking in careful syllables. I walk home through the smell of stone and leaf, carrying a map that disappears as I read it.