Seasonal paradoxes are paw marks in snow,
impressions of an absence that’s not so old,
like the silence from which words form
and back into which poems threaten to go.
Snow’s proximities open onto new spaces –
easy to underestimate scale and distances
along these cusps of mountain and cloud –
and yet they take us out of the wood.
Or maybe deeper in … Geometry
is an attempt to fix an arrangement
of leaf-mould, frond-tips, bark-crust
that hardly make themselves felt for long.
Winter denies logic, refuses measurement.
Through a warm forest, we walk in the sun.Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips
