It's Still Life

1 Vivaldi’s Winter — L’Inverno (1st Movement)

Prologue for the Deaf Listener:
This project (multi-part) is written with the deaf reader in mind. It translates orchestral movement into embodied language. These words are the sound of cold becoming a lash. Bring on the wind with teeth of glass, biting bare branches into prayers of splinter.

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1 Storm Music

The violin pulls its creak
across the pond’s black ice,
splintering
under a thousand unseen pressures.

Rock and shudder:
the hearth-stones moan
as the storm shoulders the house.

This music is not a melody.
It is a chase.
A staccato of sleet on frozen ground.
The stumbled step of someone
seeking a door.

But their breath
is no longer there.

And then …
the fury of being alive
in a world
that wants to preserve you in frost.

It stills your blood in its channels,
its furious, fighting answer:
your heart’s relentless
pounding percussion
against your ribs’ icy bars.

Listen, and feel it.

Winter’s tongue in your marrow.
Its frozen gasp,
the crack of consonants,
the frenzy of wind
against flesh.

This is the song of survival,
played from inside the storm.