This whiteness followed me at the speed of dawn.
A life-form in the fingers of an avalanche
I was, I was motion caught, I was a spot
found out by white, some foe of it, some germ
at frantic speed. The world sips its gluhwein,
high above in the tinkling chalet, stuffed,
beside the fire and betting on my chances—
who? down in the valley somewhere, blue now.
Gone, I begin again. Such is the motto
stamped on me by whiteness I enrage
by naming anything. That I only breathe
by naming I attempt to call my credo—
and see, the whiteness slashed me like a creature.
Stock-still I wait. They stash in these little stanzas
welcome rations but the thing’s outside,
pawing the air and pitiless with hunger.
Gone, I begin again. In the lovely village
every morning’s Christmas, and the shops
out-glisten nature. Nobody’s from here.
Enormous empty boots line up, the average
girl is an angel trying some on. An angel.
I ran from a word like that but I didn’t make it.
I made this shelter, I, and she doesn’t know it.
I won’t be there when she turns, typical angel,
time her own. I went, I began again—
it’s only the quest of the cold thing for the warm thing,
vowels to soften all, she cups hot chocolate
outside The Blue Grill, freezing in the sunshine,
and I think of Brodsky saying that for a star
to love its neighbour – there’s where the big idea
was had, such were the distances it traveled . . .
He made that out of words, but he lived there,
when one great desert left him to another,
twice. She ties her boots. What I mean by angel
is one who comes from nowhere to reveal
there’s nowhere but from now on it won’t matter.
She looks at where I was, then cools her gaze
as the hooded happy groups go slushing by
towards the hut that sends them to the mountain.
When I glance back from the peaks around, her place
is taken by some family and I’m
bereft like she was everything. The young
go sailing overhead, they’re all like them.
To not go up, to come this far from home
for nothing earns a stripe from the whiteness. We,
it and I, will spend the day alone
and dazzled in this blinding bright valhalla,
writing postcards from it we’re unlikely
to send until we’re gone, if ever. The sunlight
gave like a billionaire and falls like one,
in just an hour with red signs switching on
in every language till it’s out of sight.
The line of empty boots is back, the angel
nowhere to be seen but the old station,
posted there with all the past forbidden.
I saunter back with whisky to my table
and see the whiteness left its card. The evening.
The snow’s the blue of being not a thing
that ends and empty chair-lift after empty
chair-lift swing around and are still going.
