Ophelia in the frozen river: you breathe and the soundless bubbles are trapped beneath the cold surface. They burst inconsequentially, all soaked in half-hidden revelation. You are covered in leaves: "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember." There's Salvia. That's against sanity. Fingertips melt the surface, but there's no arguing with ice. There's Yew, that's for churchyards. Your face is white, and close, and far.

The far-flung eyes of Orion are closer than you are to living breath. On a winter's night steam from my lips can reach upwards and make them shiver. I have spent hoarfrost midnights singing to Jupiter rising, and he has moved across my sky to reach me. But breath cannot fight winter; warmth cannot fight cold; and a single momentary presence from which you turned away cannot fight a defined absence. Entropy is the last dance spoken, in the greatest and the least; and if you drift away from me in complex currents, your hair caught and fractal with the weed, I can do nothing, not even follow.

Here's ash.

I would cut into living stems to find you, curled up like a pearl, in the seed-pod of a poppy, and bring you back. A ghost in the rings of an oak; a conversation I had with a distant autumn morning, 4 AM and sodium. I would have come to you or brought you home or filled your heart with grammatical dreams, had you let me. But you are Ophelia in the frozen river; your silences are your ice, and your flowers.