Deep Freeze

Winter star filled night tinges deep snow blue. Breath steams into open space from pine forest edge, betraying my presence, if anyone would look. A log cabin, not old, not new, sits in a clearing ringed with dark, wild, tangled conifers, and I stand in deep cold. I stand in white snow stained blue. I stand in murky, pine wild tangled-ness, and am cold. Bitter cold. Yet so numb, I do not mind.

Star blue shades give way to pale yellow light as gaze drifts towards wood soft cabin walls. Brittle glass covered holes pour firelight, making butter islands on blue powder suitable for snow angels or burial mounds, and changes everything, or at least something. Eyeball fog-frost fractures, flakes ice, and I see clearly into the heart of softness.

In the cabin, a stone fireplace cradles flickering fire. An unusual response, a movement on frozen stiff blue lips. How odd. How different. A synapse sparks, “What is this?” I love my still, quiet blues, but this pale urine light melts something, making the beautiful, deathly cold, snow muffled world less alive than it already is.

People bathed in gold enter the picture frame window, and lip curl movement dies, leaving spittle moist corners of mouth to freeze and crack in bitter blue cold. More smoke breath obscures window movie. Stillness. Mind blank, covered in new snow. No wind. No movement. Just stone statue pluming breath. In – out In – out.

Headlight frozen deer

In imagined warmth, a family, or is this just imaginings? Movement of play, and laughter I cannot hear. I see evidence of warmth, but cannot feel what I see, for I stand outside, in blue shadowed snow, under dark brooding pines which hide me from star brilliant midnight sky --- and from what is in the clearing. Here, only breath is warm, alive for but a second before silently perishing, almost stillborn.