Cartography of the Orchard

Morning lays its map across the trees, a pale grid of frost and spider silk, and every branch is a road that remembers feet. I walk it with my pockets full of thaw.

The apples are small planets learning to orbit, green light turning slowly toward sugar. A wind writes marginal notes in the grass, the page lifts, settles, lifts again.

Somewhere a creek rehearses its single sentence, water on stone, water on stone, and I translate the sound into a name I once forgot. The air is cool enough to keep it.

By noon the lines go loose, the map dissolves; gnats stitch their bright, temporary routes. I leave a peel by the fence for the rabbits, and carry home the unrecorded weather.