How rain arrives

This morning you called
long before the sky slipped
on her sunrise skirt:
early stars blinked quietly
the way a heart beats
beneath the covers of sleep.
When the phone rang
the whole house
seized awake.
She died in the night,
was the first thing you said.
I listened to you describe
her fall, nodded my grief
into a phone gone suddenly
hard and cold.
You didn’t hear her go.
You couldn’t have known
how you’d sewn guilt
into your end of the conversation,
scratchy and strange the way
a mended sheet rubs
on a bare foot at dawn.
By the time my bed was made,
clouds shrouded the sky’s face.
When I started the car,
rain had already stained
the road dark and wet.