Inventory of an Abandoned Greenhouse

The panes have gone the green of old aquariums, and the light that enters here arrives already tired, laying itself across the benches like a cloth no one will lift again.

A trowel keeps the shape of a hand that left it, rust spreading the way a rumor spreads— slowly, then everywhere. Clay pots sit in their dust the way the patient wait, each cradling a fist of root and nothing else.

Somewhere a vine has read the broken roof as permission. It climbs the iron ribs and tries the latch, green tongue testing the cold word of the door, learning the long grammar of escape.

I came to count what loss had not yet taken and found the air itself still doing its slow work: seed-heads loosening their hoard into the hush, the future packed in husks like folded letters, addressed to weather, waiting to be opened.