Arctic Homecoming (Winter and uncertainty go together)

Now there is snow. It is winter, I admit this much.
It is hard to think of anything but the cold,
I walk around shaking my head at the cold.
The icicle hangs like a dagger,
distilling light into the bedroom window,
into the bed, into the eye of the just-awoken.
The first moment in the icy white light
I am bleary-headed, blurry-eyed
trying to catalog these old surroundings
in the heat of the blankets. In heat which I call
the fireplace, these wool socks, fresh coffee,
and which I must divide from the frost,
the breath-seeing air, the black ice we are warned against.
I try to expand; this hot and cold won’t do.
The sun’s light turns a kinder spring-yellow as it spreads across snow
in late afternoon–– A diffusion of useless dichotomy,
(a device for limiting the limitless).
I shake my head at the great unknown.
It is hard to think of anything but the stiff steel cold,
my head ballooned by false heat and frozen wind,
a strange place of intensity without clarity,
marked by these vibrations of uncertainty.
Scratchy bare-limbed trees seem right.
Winter is hardest, shuffling around in these slippers without any answers.