Iron Rain

The sky turned from dewy drab to gunmetal. Pewter raindrops slipped down the window like mercury. I went out onto the covered deck to smoke a cigar and sky gaze. Iron winged grey geese had shed their metallic plumage, ferrous sheets of sleet crashed into a low leaden haze. Easy to imagine infinitesimal steel dioramas turning within each particle of soaking spindrift. I thought of space junk, not ours, but an alien detritus drifting in from a thousand galaxies, hundreds of space craft abandoned and defunct all slipping, unmoored into fragments falling and smelted small within times rendering forge. Evidence of dead-end hopes and far explorations. I watch this riven wreckage rolling in apprehend through clouds of cigar smoke its last landfall on our far flung world as a dissolved ore in a backwash of rain.