Vault of Winter Seeds

We arrive by headlamp, the mountain a throat of snow, steel doors breathing open like a slowed bellows. Inside, the cold keeps a quiet more ancient than ice, a library where each seed is a shut eye.

The shelves are maps of hunger and generosity, barley from a wind that no longer crosses its field, tomatoes named for villages the sea has unstitched. We touch the labels the way you touch a wrist to feel a pulse.

The generators hum, a low, braided animal, and we record the frost that stitches the glass. In this light, even the frost is script, white cursive on the black pane of the world.

We leave at dawn, our bootprints already erasing, the horizon brushing on a thin band of rose. I think of the seeds sleeping like small future bones, and of the thaw that will teach them their names.