The Cartographer of Rain

At dawn the gutters begin their small apprenticeships, learning the grammar of roofs, the patient commas of eaves. Each window keeps a pale and sleepless atlas, and the street, still unbuttoned, listens for weather.

I walk with my pockets full of borrowed directions, the compass of my hand turning toward every dark fence. Somewhere a plum tree is practicing its violet silence, dropping notes into the yard like a secret tune.

The rain revises the world without asking permission. It polishes the bricks, lifts the smell of iron and leaf-mold, turns the avenue into a ribbon of moving glass, until even the pigeons look newly invented.

By evening the clouds are thinning into linen. The last water slips from a branch, a bright footstep, and the city keeps its glistening inventory, as if memory were only this: a map drawn in runoff.