Instructions for Teaching Rain to Read Radiology Films

No one remembers who noticed first:

the rain pausing above hospitals,

waiting.

Not falling.

Listening.

Under the windows,
radiographs glowed:

black oceans of bone,

white rivers of fracture,

the body’s hidden weather.

The rain lowered itself
drop by drop,

not to heal,

but to learn.

Do not teach it the names.

Names make weather arrogant.

Show it the ulna
by placing a branch in its hands.

Show it the clavicle
through the patience of birds.

Show it the pelvis
by letting valleys explain
how they hold what leaves them.

Rain understands absence.

It has always known
that every cloud

is a place where something
is waiting to return.

My mother never carried an umbrella.

She said the sky was older than fear.

During storms she walked home
with vegetables wrapped in newspaper,

headlines dissolving around her:

wars becoming rivers,

dates becoming seeds,

the world returning itself
to water.

Years later I asked
what she heard in the rain.

She touched my hand.

Not an answer.

A pulse.

The radiologists found it strange:

lungs resembling weather maps,

scars becoming tributaries,

old fractures bending toward light.

They called the images anomalies.

The rain called them letters.

Each breath was a shoreline.

Each body,

a country

whose borders moved
while we were drawing them.

At midnight,
the films were left outside.

By morning,

the storm had passed.

The images remained.

Except now

each fracture contained

a small river

flowing toward

some place

the body remembered

before it was born.