Orchard After Fire

In the orchard after fire, every tree wears the same black alphabet. No leaves. No fruit. Only branches writing against a white morning in a language smoke has made severe. The owner walks the rows with a knife, pressing bark, cutting small windows into trunks that look finished. Under one wound: brown. Under another: a filament of green so narrow it could be mistaken for hope by anyone who came needing hope. But the orchard is not a lesson. It owes no resurrection. Some roots have boiled in their own ground. Some trees will stand for a year, holding their shape out of habit, then fall in ordinary wind. Ash enters the cuffs, the mouth, the grooves of the palms. A ladder lies curled beside the irrigation pipe. The metal tags are readable still: pear, plum, quince— small names for futures that did not happen. By noon, the work becomes exact. Mark the living. Mark the uncertain. Cut nothing merely because it looks ruined. Keep nothing merely because grief has confused attachment with care. At the far boundary, where heat moved fastest, one apricot tree has split from crown to root. Inside the opening, ants carry pale eggs through chambers the flame exposed. Their procession is neither brave nor symbolic. They are moving because the old shelter can no longer shelter them. Evening settles without applause. The marked trunks darken into one body. A hose begins its low, practical rain over soil still holding the taste of smoke. Months from now, perhaps, a bud will trouble one of these branches. Perhaps the rows will be pulled and planted new. Tonight there is only water entering ash, slowly, without certainty— not forgiveness, not rebirth, but the first condition either would require.