Ashberying

Understand, I have nothing against him (as though that mattered, or its mattering mattered), but, honestly, those drowsy puns, those sleepy odalisques recumbent on a spring of lobelia sequestered in the cerebellum!

Meanwhile, we sled in tandem down the slopes, encouraged, if need be, from the sidelines. Here the syntax reposes, under its bunker of snow. An ice-bridge beckons, so over we go, nothing if not indomitable.

“Tut-tut,” mutters the bird. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Well, maybe not, we think, though we have so little to show for it, a flutter of crows punctuating whiteouts, and memories cherished against disbelief— the young girl in the anorak bearing rum punch in crystal so thin it seemed a distillation of the air, the way indoors tracked with slush after our salutary immersion, the pulpy vocables of a newspaper headline bustling to-and-fro, breathing its ruddy warmth across the vestibules of the mind.