Form of formlessness that is snow:

that covets your outline all down the street

and follows you in the door; shaken

from shoes and overcoats but filling

back gardens all that week with trees

its own secret shape. Snow violence,

noisy and brash, toppling from roofs

and digging its isobars into the map,

like crampons. The small damp patch

in your soul has spread to the ceiling

and the back bedroom wall. Tonight

the stench pipe’s mast will topple

under a roof-fall and Spring Bank

Cemetery’s Greenland whaler captains

be icebound again. Yearning

in darkness for the word ‘stillicide’

in your Hardy Collected, attic pipes

burst with enthusiasm; dark water’s

blind eyes open where it falls

on vistas of brick dust and plaster.

A library is holding its breath

underwater, dedications paroled

from their promises in a sunburst

of inkspots relaxed into chaos

and pulp. Truth and beauty

overflow Keats’s name rewritten

in water, encounter longer than usual

waits on the phone, a builder come

to poke at the roof while his mate chews

on a biscuit, all the dreary naiads

of a coldwater tap vomiting grit.

This page too is now underwater,

Narcissus dissolved in his pool:

blizzarding through holes in the roof

falls the furious indoor snow.