The Orchard of Signals

At dawn the dish fields tilt like sunflowers, white throats opened to a light without heat, the desert combed into gold and copper, listening to the slow rain of data.

A lizard writes its name in the dust and erases it with the soft brush of its tail, as if no map should keep a body too long, as if the sky itself forgets to remember.

Above, the orchard ripens in orbits, fruit of quiet metal, blue in the mind, sending their thin sweetness through open air, a choir too high for the ear to hold.

At night the sand cools into a dark lake, and the antennas drink, patient and still; I think of old letters never sent, and the machines that keep them warm.