Cistern of Weather

The cistern on the roof keeps a second sky, a dark bowl stitched to the building's spine. Each afternoon it tastes the gutters' copper, the leaf-flakes, the city's powdered weather.

At night it holds the tremor of tramlines, the red blink of towers, the pause between sirens. Somewhere a heron sleeps in the wet reeds and the water remembers the shape of its legs.

In the morning we open the hatch and listen: a small, submerged applause, pebble and echo. Light climbs the ladder of the walls and spills, as if the day were being poured from below.

I have begun to trust what gathers in the dark: not emptiness, but pressure, revision, seed. Even thirst has a blueprint for returning, a clear hand writing itself through rust.