Winter's Body

Winter’s body is a car boot sale, a mosaic of the seasons and shifts, the breezes and breaths of a year’s footsteps, gone. The battered wheels of a truck, spinning against morning frost, rotate into its eyes. Berries, dropped by a robin mid-flight, are smushed and stretched to make fingertips. Leaves colour and curl to form that receding hairline. Winter is ambidextrous: can wake in chill, just to later doze in warmth; is neither gender, with its sex a fresh April daisy and an October mud pie; has a diary’s dog-eared pages for scabs to pick at. Puddles that freeze, melt, undulate, act as lungs: expanding. drip. decreasing. drip. Toddlers’ mittens sewn to jackets decorate Winter’s mouth with a cross-stitched grin. Winter has stained glass, fired in prayer, for flesh; regurgitated cud as wrists. It has clumped silt for a nose, dotted with freckles from sand; vines that interrupt brick for hips. Winter is not just winter but the culmination of a year, with bark as its backbone: a spine that creaks, splinters and protests against autumnal rheumatism, yet will slip into a supple Spring bend with the gentle weave of a craftsman’s hand.