when you are winter

it’s quiet here
as if Grief is at last asleep
And Loss departed,
Words are wordless and even Yearning distracted by this stillness.

The Pain of the World is in momentary lightness
hanging above like an ancient blanket.

Here, the river is still water, oceans waveless and immutable.

Is this the breath halted to an exhale?
The pulse imperceptible as if dead, the mind now a white bald moon.

Only I move slow as not to wake the grief and stir the longing
and spook the sea,
slow as not to remind gravity of the world’s pain that defied it,
to not remind the mind of thought or possibility.

For this moment I know is only temporary,
as I learn the ways of movement and stagnancy:
one day I am full and flowing,
another dry and dumb.

Mother taught me how to die well,
how to bloom again but first
to surrender to fertile empty
to lack of,
to spaces in-between
not dark nor light, neither here nor there, nothing and no one
and all-becoming and so full.

When your page stares back at you blankly, when there is no lover and
when you can’t paint
and there is no more song in you, dried up of all you were,
remember:

you are winter
and remember
how to make fire –
your small phalanges are kindling, ash epidermis
remember, you are a body of seasons
stillness has never been still
death only a birthing into your next becoming.