Words of Giants

in years past, winter would reach out through autumn and seize summer to throttle it, and its bones would clatter to the ground like leaves and its blood would leech out like morning colour as the sun rises coldly. in years past, winter was a heartless killer and its punishment was an empty white room and a grey prison barred with rain.
there would be an autumn, a time of cool sunshine and rebellious brightness filling a canvas swallowed by clouds and water; saturated by rain, autumn’s colours saturated red, orange, yellow. this was in years past.
now, i curl tiredly on the couch near the window at 4 p.m. on a sunday, say, in december and wonder – is this darkness its own fault? i wonder, recalling the oppressive grey heat of deep summer, the air heavy with particulates, the trees dying without colour while summer reigned, if winter had no hand in its bleakness. this dead season, butted up against summer with shocking abruptness, is just what’s left. there wasn’t even enough for autumn – this year or the last, if i correctly recall; maybe just a day of it, where a single tree in the woods waited for the ancient tradition of transition though its companions could not hold out. only the one tree was granted the funerial costume of gold to remember the richness of its body; the others died in the green of their adulthood grown brittle in bitter waiting.
i have a new perspective on winter, now, though it’s not helping me bear its darkness any better. i’m just bearing with it, this year, instead of bearing against it, and i’m not sure if that’s a meaningful distinction. in fact, if it means anything, it’s that i am feeling bleak and empty and have confidence that i did not have the energy to reach back into summer to drag myself closer to it. i did not cause this; i’m just what’s left, and i’m dark and growing colder.
i’m closer to the winter now. not that i was ever full summer, blooming madly, but i was surely the end of summer – draining colours, feeling more and more tired. i was the positive, on which was exerted negative pressure; something alive, even if just its remnants, feeling the throttling hand of the vague, murdering winter.
now i am the winter, but not that active grasping claw of it, and the summer left behind was not youth or promise. the summer was a crop of lusty weeds that devoured every nutrient and ate the earth from under itself and my winter is a landscape of withered stalks, unrecognizable and featureless. i’m just what’s left.