Turning

We sure try, but we're running out of metaphors for becoming winter.
Jack says it is watching yourself fall from a great height,
but Susan is so sure that sometime in November
we all start skating along a mobius strip of ice.
Kristin reminds us that it's also a giant spruce tree
holding us in its branches like so many drifts of snow.
But here in the north, the crystal lattice of Decembers
only remind me of my father with snow in his mustache,
the way his breath hung before him,
and how he told us that the importance is in the icicles,
their perfectly singular descents
like the cold fragile distance of our lives.