The Last Honest Streetlight

Rain again, the kind that does not fall so much as wait. The streetlight at the corner has been honest for forty years and it is tired of it. Down the block a door closes on a conversation no one will repeat. Somewhere a phone rings in an office that emptied at six. The city keeps its secrets the way a coat keeps a man, loosely, and only until the weather turns. There is a name in a ledger that explains all of it. No one will read that far. The light holds. The dark does the rest.