Change is visible; it’s in the air
my breath like steam from the soup spoon.
Along its length, the glasshouse draws in flower
and fern, some tender-hearted émigrés
but mostly patterns cut in ice. The life-size models
in suspension, in their shelter belts
hibernating with hedgehogs.

Sequence of season is determined in the heavens
and fast by the heavens, that great hunter
has come to rest, overhead, at the midnight hour.
We begin another round of countdown
days ticked off, December ticking by.
Almost at the end, a neonate appears
totem against each annual death or maybe
to shift some universal blame.

Aeons ago they say an Eastern megastar was born
a goat-signed mystic healer and we toss tinsel into Yule
as birthday celebrants. How faux! An adventitious advent
confined to numbered boxes. This re-birther
is as water from the Spring
a searing sword of solstice
a magnitude of Autumn…