The Observatory After the Storm

The dome sits like a bowed head on the ridge, a puddle of starlight held in rusted ribs. Wind combs the grasses through broken glass, teaching them to whistle in a language of needles.

Inside, the telescope is a long, quiet animal, its eye filmed with dust, its spine of gears asleep. A moth writes its small orbit on the wall, and the air tastes of iron and thawed rain.

Clouds drift below the windows, a slow white sea; the valley is hidden, the roads unspooled. I set my palm on the cold metal and feel how weather remembers the shape of a hand.

When night returns, it will not be the same sky— more generous, perhaps, for having been missed. The building holds its breath, then lets it go, a soft exhale of silence into the dark.