The Weather Inside the Array

At daybreak the panels lie open, black scales of a quiet animal, each drinking dew and a thin blue light as if the sky were a well.

Clouds travel like slow herds across the field, their shadows grazing the glass; electrons lift and run in the wires, a soft metallic river kept from sight.

A technician walks the rows with a rag and a voltmeter, listening for the hum that says the system is alive; he thinks of his grandmother’s orchard, how the trees learned to feed on sun the same way.

By evening the grid exhales its stored warmth, cities blink awake one by one, and above the array the first stars appear, small and ancient, still burning without permission.