Ode of a Dying Winter

It's getting to that point where the temperature has risen high enough above zero that I feel guilty for taking the bus instead of my bike. The other day driving on the way to a movie I rolled down my window to happy couples and fattening nubiles thinning their fleshes with pounded pavement; I rolled it down cuz the car was getting hot. I thought it was the imminent spring. Turns out it was the heater left on from the night before.

I have pleasant memories of the winters I have left behind and great hopes for those to come. The awesome puddles that are day by day turning the plains of grass into midday marshes have rendered even my awesome steel-toed boots all but useless. The water gets into everything like a humid Japanese winter. I make my way through these dripping, thawing late winter days with thoughts of massive icicles,

six and a half boys tempted the four-foot icicles with rocks:
one proven immortal when it shattered in his head,
another mortal when it pinned him to the rotting earth

and with the books of poetry, philosophy, and comics I read on the toilet for which Colleen went out of her way to procure a wicker basket, because, let's be honest, I'm slowly but steadily moving every book I own into the bathroom. There, I recall, with a little help from Edna,

There was upon the sill a pencil mark,
Vital with shadow when the sun stood still
At noon, but now, because the day was dark,
It was a pencil mark upon the sill.
And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same
dead moment, blank and vacant of itself,
Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame,
A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf.
Whence it occurred to her that he might be,
The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined,
That stood at twenty minutes after three--
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clocks nor people, but only dead.