Winter like a Hollow Hand

It's the season closest
if anything
to the stale air of
an empty waiting room,
housing nothing but the slick quiet ghosts
of different shades of fear.
There's that dried blood red of desperation,
those treacle-colored leaves of trepidation,
that putrid paint yellow of a handful
of lost hopes, clinking
to the bottom of a well.

Winter like the coldest
dawning of the sun, that
scintillating
scarring wash of snow, those
blue-winged shadows and that
biting sun-deaf glare.

Birds tangle in my hair and
scratch my temples with their claws-
migrate, migrate, and I'm
clipping off their wings in a salty tumble
of longing.