Seasonally peppering us with her bland white pigments,
Winter creeps up in bare-bone whispers and the bleak absence
of things once known and felt and pulsing through like hot blood,
to say only, "Perhaps, though, not?"
Her mood is tempestuous and capable, a white-washed threat,
but it is her quiet, too, that frightens and resonates.
In this ice-prismed uneasiness is her ability to freeze time,
to render earth bare and brittle, cold and un-moving,
urging us to authenticate and to prove truths taken for granted,
in the mist of amnesia fogging up our soul's summer light.
And so we fall back on memories and monuments and monumental holidays
of sacred rememberings and the hurried ignoring, a pretentious ignorance.
We exhume a grace that is grated, shredded, and grating on our nerves
until we are left to pick up the tissue paper and truth in its smallest fragments:
Pieces of peace-less crude elements, until we turn to one another in urgent tones,
to say, "These? Only these forms left of the promise and the magic and the grandeur?"
Here we are left with Winter's mandatory pause- that authoritative opaqueness,
a revolving kind of numb to enforce her agenda, talons sheathed but stretching
in cool white feathered clouds, to say: Just think. Just wait. Just pause.
Slower, more slowly, the frills shrink away in her unrelenting gaze
to lay humanity bare in humility and our squeamish self-reflection
until we see- finally see, really see, the light resonating, engulfing,
surrounding, in a majestic and cosmic, ethereal pursuit.
And the spin and the dance and the motion of truth's scarlet story
thrums us back into the arms of resurrection life once more.
