Cartography of an Old Balcony

The sky unspools its bruised grey silk,
over clotheslines weighed with rain.
A sparrow pauses on the rusted ledge,
where your teacup used to claim
its circular territory of steam and dusk.

Between the mortar and the peeling lime,
a stubborn banyan leaf begins its climb,
measuring the architecture of our quietude—
how two people can inhabit the same square foot
and speak across two different centuries.

Below, the city sharpens its neon teeth,
the traffic hums a low, indifferent psalm.
Yet here, five floors above the asphalt,
time is only what the water remembers
before it leaves the eaves.