It's Still Life

2 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.

---

2 The Fall
Prologue: The ice was not a floor. It was a trapdoor.

One moment, the world is vertical,
the next,
a sudden,
shocking horizon.

The violin’s staccato
shatters — a long, sliding wail.
This is balance betrayed,
of the body learning,
mid-air,
the grammar of descent.

A sharp, white note,
the impact
cracks movement like a bone.

Then, the swirl.
Sensation.
Cold seeping through wool,
urgent and intimate.
The sky, a dizzying
carousel of grey.

A granular taste of snow
and salt on the lip.

The orchestra muffles.
Softens.
Throbs in the temples.
The slowed, stunned percussion
of a heart recalibrating
inside a shaken chest.

Lying there,
collected by the cold,
a temporary feature of the landscape.

And winter swirls on,
indifferent,
magnificent,
composing its aria around his still form.

The melody is no longer around him.
It is within.
It is an ache,
a sharp, clean pain that anchors him
perfectly to the frozen earth.

---

AI Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2026.