Frost
Perched on a TV aerial the starling beaks a noise like a small door opening before lifting quietly off into the morning sky. From her height the frozen city appears suspended in a fine blue chalk dust. The shallow U of the Rovers ground cups the cold moon waning in the direction of the Severn and Wales. Down among the houses steam unfurls from a thousand boilers all turned up to eleven. She glides in and around the white towers of vapour before two strong wing beats take her up the hill, over the wall and into the quiet park.
A family is out taking photos of the hard frost, that plays stand-in for snow the rest of the country has enjoyed. Two children skate hands on new ice in the concrete cattle trough. Our starling circles above, watching dogs on morning walks, heaving at the end of leads or hurdling over icy tufts of brittle grass. A man with binoculars looks into a tree, his dog careening in circles. She lands softly in a thin stand of trees surrounding a walled pond. From here the ground glistens, a billion grass blades serrated with frost. She beats the cold out of her wings and skips down a branch to keep an eye on a clutch of magpies bashing through the leaves below. The man looking into the tree is now looking at her, which she feels in her core. For a second she is unsettled but frozen, like the iceberg landscape below, then she is up and off, leaving the field of ice, and crossing another wall beyond which the seed-head covered land angles gently away to a strip of woodland before ending abruptly at the motorway edge.
Blue tits ping in hawthorn branches. She listens but doesn’t understand. Opaque white ice has formed in boot prints impressions on the dark paths that criss cross the whiteness. Nowhere for a drink here. The man with the binoculars is back but looking the other way, across the trees to a church spire floating in the mist. Up, up she flies. An orange sorbet scoop of sun melts upwards from the horizon, rising gloopily behind a grill of silhouetted trees. The scene is coming to life as more dogs pour into the field and manoeuvring cars lock up the small car park. Our starling returns to her aerial in time to watch the binoculars man returning home, rubber boots banging like tom-toms on the pavement, cold leaky face buried in a scarf. The dusty cold morning is hers.