Greenhouse Under the Stars

At the hilltop observatory, glass ribs sweat before dawn, ferns climb the old telescope like patient smoke, pots crowd the dome where constellations used to burn, and rain taps Morse code into the copper seams.

I water basil in the bowl of a broken lens, each drop enlarges my thumb, my pulse, the dirt's dark glitter. Outside, the town wakes in rectangles of sodium light; inside, mint breath and wet soil rewrite the weather.

At noon, bees circle the brass gears we could not salvage, sunlight turns the cracked star charts transparent as onion skin, and tomatoes hang like small planets learning gravity, red with a silence no equation ever solved.

When night returns, I close the dome by hand, leave one slit open for a single bright cold witness. The plants lean upward, listening through their stems, as if the sky were still speaking in green.