I imagine her ribcage an icebox swollen with freezer burn; her heart— once a blooming geranium—glazed with dry frost, black with bite, the candlelight of her aorta having gone out with the last crimson petiole of the season.

I imagine her pupil swallowing sweet slice of winter’s tangerine sky—her one eye unblinking—in empty hope of efflorescing jade, pine, pistachio out of slate. I imagine sun dripping into ink, blue pond black with it, swan stained with it; Sylvia plucking one of the fouled feathers, now useless to him—the poor thing—but a bottomless well from which to scrape endlessly the poetry of December’s brooding sunsets.

What vein can be tapped to ebb these wintered tides? What words could pearl from mind’s desolate plain?