The Oldest Posture of the Land

The shift begins in the air’s density: a faint thinning at the edges of warmth, the atmosphere recalibrating its balance of heat and loss. Light fractures differently across stone, and shadows migrate along new vectors. The world reorders itself by degrees, quiet and measurable and precise.

   cold’s first filament

   drawn through the weave of morning—

   a pale intrusion

   altering the field of breath

   before breath knows it has changed

Pigment withdraws from leaf-tissue in slow collapse, not flare but unbinding, chlorophyll letting go of its green grip and revealing minerals stored in silence. Branches register the shift as tension easing, as if the canopy were a net loosening after a long season of holding.

   spectrum unthreads now

   colour sinking from the crown—

   a muted reveal

   of the stone-light buried deep

   in every living surface

Trails contract at their margins, and sound travels farther in the clarified air. Frost begins writing its crystalline grammar on cedar and slate, and for a heartbeat the forest ages backward, rings brightening under bark, light recoiling into its oldest form. The land’s musculature stiffens in preparation for what comes next.

   ice-script at the edge

   marking thresholds of the hour—

   a cold lexicon

   guiding whatever moves here

   through the season’s narrowing

What falls does not break. Leaf, light, heat: each releases at its appointed interval, a sequence older than colour or weather. The year sheds accumulated brightness until only structure remains, trunk and root and the mineral undercurrent the warm months briefly concealed.

   measured drift downward

   reducing the world to form—

   a final stillness

   where what endures stands revealed

   in the land’s oldest posture,

   winter gathering its first breath