Pruning the Winter Orchard

I walk the rows with my grandfather's blade, the trees asleep and grey as the church bells, each branch a sentence the frost left unfinished.

I cut where the wood has stopped believing in itself, where last summer's fever still clings, blackened, and the saw breathes a small white dust into the cold.

What I take, I take so the rest will carry — this is the arithmetic of orchards, addition by subtraction, a sweetness owed to loss.

The cut ends weep a clear and stubborn sap; the field exhales its long blue shadows toward the fence, and somewhere under the soil the roots are listening.

By dusk the pile of severed limbs stands tall, a winter's worth of what would not have ripened, and the trees, lighter now, lean into the coming light.