He opens his eyes to a hard frost, the morning's soft amnesia of snow.

The thorned stems of gorse are starred crystal; each bud like a candied fruit, its yellow picked out and lit by the low pulse of blood-orange riding in the eastern trees.

What the snow has furred to silence, uniformity, frost amplifies, makes singular: giving every form a sound, an edge, as if frost wants to know what snow tries to forget.

And so he drinks for winter, for the coming year, to open all the beautiful tiny doors in their craquelure of frost; and he drinks like the snow falling, trying to close the biggest door of all.