Chris Gilpin
Each Winter Every Winter
The house holds winter over its head
on a book, the covers its roof, and us,
the pages within. The book stillness
rising, a fat sky wedge plowing
upwards, as the snow rotates down,
a repeated background on vertical scroll.
Winter bringing yesterwinter,
piled onto by the winter before,
carrying the winter three winters ago
when our car crashed through the snowbank
coming out cleaner than it went in
to another winter, the coldest one
on record, echoing
a sneer of glaciers bejewelled by the sun.
Winter bringing futurewinter,
the one where the car crashed through the guide rail,
coming out grated like aluminium cheese in
to a stupid winter without snow,
on top of a science fiction winter,
nuclear, with books
burning, evangelicals dancing
round the conflagration, plutonium flurries
swirling at their feet.
Plus the winters unwritten, unrecorded, humming
like a bassline on the other side of a wall,
as the snowglobe recycles its fable,
winter upon winter, piling into memory,
each with the same light cold touch.
Chris Gilpin has won numerous accolades in the spoken word and slam communities including the 2011 Vancouver Individual Poetry Slam Championship. His work has been published in Geist, PRISM international, CV2, Vancouver Review, and The Canadian Review of Literature in Performance. He is the Executive Director of Vancouver Poetry House.
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