The Glasshouse Forgets Its Keeper

No one comes anymore to crank the high windows open, so the panes keep their own weather— a private fog that beads, lets go, beads again, writing the same word on the glass and rubbing it out before it can be read.

The ferns have learned the door is only a habit. They press their green knuckles through the seams, patient as the slow math of rust, unbuttoning the iron ribs one bolt at a time until the roof is more sky than ceiling.

A trowel rests where a hand set it down, its blade gone the orange of old apples. The watering can holds a season of rain and a single drowned moth, wings spread like a swimmer who decided, at last, to stay.

Evening pours through the broken seam and lies down warm across the gravel beds. Something the keeper planted and never named opens a white throat in the dusk and sings, in the only voice it has, of being left.