There’s no snow this Christmas… there was snow

when we received the small horses and small cart,

brothers together all those years ago.

There were small watches made of liquorice

surrealist as time hung over chairs.

I think perhaps that when we left the door

of the white cottage with its fraudulent icing

we were quite fixed as to our different ways.

Someone is waving with black liquorice hands

at the squashed windows as the soundless bells

and the soundless whips lash our dwarf horses forward.

We diverge at the road-end in the whirling snow

never to meet but singing, pulling gloves

over and over our disappearing hands.