It's Still Life

6 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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6 Vivaldi’s L’Inverno — (Winter)
Brittle Joy of the Mind

The storm lifts—not ends.
A sudden, silent pressure in the ears.

You push up.
Blood screams back into veins—
a thousand needle-points
charting your aliveness.

A sound escapes.
Not laughter.
The echo of laughter
striking ice.

This is not happiness.
It is recognition.
The bare, astonishing fact
that you did not end.

Pain remains—a deep, blue note.
Joy is the sharp, bright overtone
ringing above it,
thin as a crack in glass.

You are not safe.
You are merely here.
And ‘here’ is a tremor,
a vibration
on the wire of the cold,
singing one note,
high and clear and terribly alone:
I am. I am. I am.