Winter Solstice

Breath puffs up from the Underworld, fjords in miniature, reddish gneiss cleft along surprisingly straight lines. A noise like reluctant glass is oak branches rubbing each other dry. I could tell you how happy I am, that I cried recently for the first time about someone hurting me deeply long ago, and that the years of agony seem gone but it would clutter this pure coast. Mist is a window of wool, frost is a forest of fur. Nylon strings that might catch and kill some animal turn out to be a cobweb coated with ice, white magic of midwinter dusk. Signs warn against a sheer drop I couldn't possibly find except in my mind or by mistake. Every pine needle has a twin of transparent plastic on the leeward side. Blackbirds and jackdaws are attacking haws and hips. Rambling sheep resemble shrubs, shreds and ribbons dangling. I imagine caves where mermaids flash blue nervous tails. Visibility approaching nil, the lighthouse beams in vain, revolving its three solar symbols, huge lenses weighing two tons each, so I'm told. Then I remember Woolf: "nothing was simply one thing." I hear the sea swell, taste sea smells, but can't see the sea for fog this briefest deepest day spending itself in smoke, a log.