How the Winter

comes, reneges, arrives again, retreats,
resumes, returns, replaces autumn’s dithered
changing with iced and water-black city streets,
and lingering garden squash and gourds with withered
vines; how it makes the bleak sum of short
daylight between a slow sunrise and swift
setting seem like gravitational drift
out, out away from orbit toward the Oort
Cloud and then interstellar space, the sun
reduced to pinlight, sky aswarm with blind
stars unmarked by any conscious mind,
all consciousness alone, all life succumbed,
all water still, the air made ice, all sense
insensate now, asleep in the shattering silence.