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In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

- Excerpt from A Christmas Carol by Christina Rossetti

***

My mirror-face is pinched pallid as, colourlessly, I go over and over his last journey, and shudder like a train on a track. His last tracks...tracks in the snow...train tracks. Tear-tracks dampen my ashen cheeks, but tears, though summer-warm, don't thaw the bone-chill of alone.

his snowflake letter
cold on an empty car seat -
no explanation

Just sorry and people don't always understand I only hope you can and goodbye.

I took to my bed as the ripped days bled, pulled the duvet up over my head, shaken by a blizzard of dread. Fingers in ears, didn't want to hear about last movements, CCTV footage, forensics. My words fell snow-silent and, as people have pointed out to me since, now I only speak through poetry's voice, its mediumistic mouth.

I'm reading a book Coping With Suicide, well, I'm trying to read. But each page is a snowdrift muffling my mind; each word is a curled black whorl of iron-hard earth. I've stopped counting the days and nights, they've merged into a blizzard blur of winter-white. And the hoarded condolence cards all cry winter in snowflake whites and star silvers: In Deepest Sympathy ivory-traced, With Sympathy silver-etched.

Who would have thought grief had so many shades of winter? That death had a colour? Whilst others died with a heart attack's red squeeze or cancer's black rampage, he died with suicide's expanding white, its barren blank.

Poking food around my plate, staring sickly-numb, dumb, at the mounded joyful orange of carrots, the happy yellow smiles of corncobs. Ashen faces in sifting ashy light; voices ermine-soft in empathy.

friends coax-feeding me
at a table set for one -
his chair is empty

Sleeping with his photograph, well, feigning sleep, through each silent night. Nothing holy in loss and lonely, just a hole blown through the heart.

Remembering: winter woodland walks hand in hand, plans we made, foundations laid. Frost-framed photos, snapshot days: a memory mural. Each shared moment freezing to a cold grief-pearl. Blanched branches window-tapping, and I'm thinking it's him.

filigree window
vista of Christmases past...
heart-held memories
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