The Library Under Permafrost

At midnight the mountain unlocks one steel eyelid, air spills out, thin as glasswater and older than maps. Boxes sleep in their alphabet of wild grains, each label a small country folded to silence.

My lamp combs frost from the corridor walls; the cold rings like a tuning fork in my teeth. Inside the packets, summers wait without breath: sorghum suns, rice rain, barley with wolf-gray beards.

Above us, cities trade weather for smoke and haste, but down here time kneels and counts by germination. I press my palm to a crate from a vanished valley and hear, through cardboard, the rustle of future fields.

When I seal the door, dawn is a pale seam eastward. Snow takes my footprints back into its blank notebook. Somewhere a child will bite an apricot not yet planted, and juice will run like light from a reopened archive.