The Garden After Rain

The garden after rain is not clean. It is only more itself: soil darker, the rose leaning into its own weight, a snail writing its silver signature. I have tried to be useful today and failed in the way a garden fails, which is to say, not at all. The beans do not care who waters them. Somewhere a drain clears its throat. The light, when it comes, will come sideways, half-hearted, tender, the way light returns to a room where someone has been crying. I will sit here until the mosquitoes find me. I will sit here and be found. The mint has made its decisions without me. The rain has already forgotten my name.