Winter Palace

For Viral

Silent now, the singing fountains.
Flown South, the nesting birds.
Frost licks the gardens.

Cold winds sweep the corridors,
The rooms lie still and bare,
even echoes lose their way.

You are my Winter Palace.
Your bones are beautiful.

What is no longer here reveals
what never is not.

Summer’s Palace is voluble,
its trees thick with telling,
heavy with fruit.
Its rooms plush with memory,
raked with vows, a thousand blooms.

But this is the season of stark,
of dark and bone-deep stirring.
This is the season of release
from doing.

You are my Winter Palace.
Not empty, but full
of space. Rife with unchanging
change.

Love lives here waiting,
without waiting,
grows me up,
the red bird
that stayed.