painting by Casper David Friedriech

snowscape   © 1999/2002  DUANA R. ANDERSON

Frozen.

Powdery white opium-dream, swirling, whipping frantically. Endless twilight blending earth and sky. Snowflakes swarming like static into a mammoth poltergeist swooping the landscape. The light burned cool brilliance, searing eyes from the head, endless desert sands shifting in powdery dunes, ocean of ice, vacant light and stark profusion.

All is nothing, is everything, the universe swallowed by a single cell. Beauty transformed from emptiness and desolation; an unspoiled virginity, a seed germinates, a thought blossoms and with awareness becomes a vision, beginning and end, life and death and rebirth; the unbroken stillness and simplicity that is utter perfection.

The numbness no longer burned, licked by icicles and kissed by frosty tongues, and the dying ember of my soul captured in its frozen embrace. Mistress Winter's sweet and bitter redemption. Tranquility transcended by loss, the chrysalis ruptured and a million baby spiders broke out to consume their Madonna, eyes wide and blinded by frozen tears, lips parting a dying breath in smoke signals rising to the sky. Eternity stretched with glacial idleness, silence swelling, the cry of a babe in infancy, the smell of age and parchment skin, the flavor of sexual pleasure on the tongue and mouth, a million little deaths like bubbles rising upon the surface of a pond.

This is the end.

This is the beginning.