I have learned the language of water
how it speaks in percussion on tin roofs,
in whispers against windowpanes,
in the slow saturation of earth.
Each drop carries a latitude,
a longitude of sky it fell from,
mapping its descent through cumulus,
through the territories of wind.
The puddles become mirrors of inversion,
where trees grow downward into depths,
and clouds lie trapped beneath our feet
like continents we’ll never walk.
I stand at the boundary of wet and dry,
that shifting border where the world
divides itself between the fallen
and the falling, the soaked and soon-to-be.
And in this interstitial space,
I am neither sheltered nor exposed,
but something in between, a witness
to the patient rewriting of the land,
one syllable of water at a time,
each one a word in an endless poem
the sky has been composing
since before we learned to listen.
