Greenhouse in the Old Observatory

At the hill's crown the telescope sleeps, its brass throat fogged with breath from fern leaves. Rain drums the dome like fingers learning piano, and every pane turns the dawn into green smoke.

Tomato vines climb the ladder to the eyepiece, coiling around rusted stars on the handwheel. A moth opens and closes like a tiny book against the chart where Orion once burned.

I water the pots with a kettle that whistles low; steam rises, a slow constellation of ghosts. Seeds listen in the dark and split themselves open, soft as envelopes from a country without roads.

By noon the room is a weather of basil and light. Planets no longer matter, only petals and soil. Still, when wind moves the dome, it sounds like surf, and the sky leans down to smell what we have made.