winter sleep

In winter you forget, you remember?

What words were said and unsaid. 

You brought some snow in from the cold, your feet sinking deep into the drift of the outside world, the transformed patch of land that was as still as the night and the stars. You held it in the palm of your hands and placed it in a silver bowl, next to the fire. 

How long before Spring? How long before you forget the words that were said, unsaid? And who could imagine the possibilities in that ice-world, the emergence of red and green from the winter sleep of the heart.

Let us have winter loving that the heart...The season where you are not to be found. And so I shall write you on my white page, and there you shall exist, a single brush-stroke of concentrated time, a pattern within the loving mind.

{Lines by Elizabeth Jennings}