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.
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