The Forest’s puddle frost lay unquiet this morning. No planar crystal panes showing clear undershores, but a twisted crazing of partial melts and freezes forming gentle lozenges or sharp shards like creamy guttered candle runnels or inundated torn tissue papers.
I crouched to feel the surfaces, their curled micro-ridges like reflected finger whorls, slicked by light human touch. Cropped grass blades cut the surface in spattered ink patterns; green lances pointed at the sky, rimed with hoar.
Where transient pools sit over porous ground, the thin ice caps get left behind, looped round stranded branches, propped on drained leaf litter. Ghost pools on the forest floor.
