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
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.