The Observatory Turns Green

In the hill’s old dome, pigeons keep the hours, clocks of soft wings, a pendulum of dust. The lens is gone; a round skylight remains, a mouth that learned to swallow weather.

Someone plants mint in the cracked meridian. It climbs the brass scars, it scents the calculus. A watering can glints like a small moon, and the floor remembers the constellations’ chalk.

At night the town sends up its streetlight bloom. Through the open iris, moths gather like notes, and the dome hums with their paper hush, a choir rehearsing light without a score.

By morning, dew turns every rail to a river. We walk the spiral stairs, palms greened with ivy, naming the planets not by distance but by touch— Mars: rusted hinge; Saturn: the ring of thyme.