It's Still Life

7 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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7 Vivaldi’s L’Inverno — (Winter)
The Duration

The storm has spent its adjectives.
Now, only nouns.

Cold.
Field.
Silence.

You do not shake.
You stand.

This is fatigue
as duration,
as an answer
that no longer argues.

The body has forgotten
how to flinch,
learned a deeper discipline,
to hold,
to be a long, unbroken note.

This is winter’s sparse composition.

Breath smokes,
a pale, continuous ribbon.
The heart beats,
a drum,
a pendulum,

measuring,
not fighting,
the cold.

This is not endurance.
It is acquaintance.

You and winter
have drawn a truce,
a language of duration.

You are not waiting for spring.
You are fulfilling winter.

The ice does not crack.
It bears.
You do not suffer.
You reside.

And in this ceasefire of sensation,
a final, quiet truth sounds.

You have outlasted the need
to outlast
anything at all.