On the Locust in Winter, a Passage

Winter exposes to the eye the fully play of light and shadow in the locusts’ naked branches. The light is clear, and as bracing as the wind bending the topmost twigs, but it is not hard; it is rather reminiscent of Mozart, in his glittering, joyous precision. The eye, long oversaturated by Summer’s verdancy an Autumn’s glory, at first barely detects color—yet it is not long before the lichen blooms to perception—and the light, too, contributes to a constant, if subtle, shift in color. Thus Winter’s seeming lack is broken open, to reveal beneath the fiction of sameness and want, a teeming superfluity.