Mildendo Winter Ragtime

Winter encroaches. With its bellyful of harmonized graveside hollows. Its long fog of celebratory bells.

In the time it's taken me to leave, this city has grown white with longing. I peer into your snow and see the newfound bones of the New World, our world, ossified by that Sisyphian calling. I hold out my right hand, and you bandage it, as though it were charred and smoked. I wince, half to keep up the illusion, half with the imagined, yet real pain of what life would be if I had tossed my hand in the great Fire.

It's a nice word. Fire. But it doesn't belong in days so cold. When the lights drop, we take off the hooks inside our marionette collars and go stand outside, on the theatre corner, trying to hail a cab. I spot a great big black one sliding towards nirvana, and pull you out of its way just in time. We lie on top each other, speckled in dirt from the oncoming traffic, my mouth admonishing yours for standing in the way of cars.

For looking so small and spindly while you weep. Who said that thinking is enough to make either of them see us? Have you forgotten we are nobody, bereft our strings?

I squeeze you to my belly tight, to keep my hollow tin chest from caving in on itself, and hope your love is enough to see us both through the long night, this first winter night. Cling to love where money will do, except they pay us by the meter, not by the hour. Our crosswire suspension, enough to make you think you're gigantesque and could crush anyone who steps on my toes and cracks my bones, sly, under your own oak-bellow foot.

You are become so white, my love. Make me rearrange my chest, and swallow palefuls of blood off your hands to wipe you clean. Hide evidence against the newborn snow, because no ordinary mud is enough to top up what should be ours, by crook.

Hey-ho, winter's afoot.

But there once was fall. There's no death without fall? Try to mark up my metaphors to even our celestial tally, while you wink down through a gale of wind, transform your voice into coy ripples of laughter and warmth, to keep me against the brutal onslaught of cold and harangue.

I'm reminded often, in the eye of grand people, of how scrawny I've grown, how only I know of the bitter iron force inside my belly.

Are we sisters?

I call to your coat-hook shoulder, on the cab ride home. You sizzle sadly under your too-big-coat, like hot coal dropped unceremoniously inside a puddle.

Are we at war?

And recognizing the snake's hiss in the willows before I do, you put your dry lips to mine and breathe to me a baby I don't yet know how to birth. We find, together, winter has grown.

We find, if we stand on one another's shoulders, cab drivers see us and stop on the promise of dirty parlor tricks, to make up the difference between their high noses and the lint in our pockets.

The proceeds of our love-lorn night go, always, to charity. At witching hour, you rebandage my hand, and bundle me tight, waiting for spring to come back to us.

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I wanted some words to accompany these autumn shots of Prague. That was the original idea, but I started riffing off how quickly winter came over the city, and ended up here. I don't know how to do these picture posts, so I babble and later wish I'd stuffed wallpaper into my mouth. I'm led too often by words. I wait. Mostly for spring to come back.