The Orchard That Remembers

In the orchard, dusk is a slow tide of copper, leaves lifting their small, lacquered hands. A ladder leans like a half-finished sentence, its rungs tasting the last heat of day.

The apples are planets with their own weather, rain held in a skin thin as a whisper. When one falls, the earth hums a low bell, and the grass bows to the sound.

I walk between rows where shadows braid, foxes of light darting through the trunks. Each tree keeps a ledger of storms and summers, rings curled tight as sleeping cats.

Night arrives on soft wheels, unannounced. The stars spill like seed across the furrowed dark. I hold a fruit to my mouth and it splits, a map of sweetness and time.