The Unaccompanied: Poems - Rilegato

Last Snowman
He drifted south

down an Arctic seaway

on a plinth of ice, jelly tots

weeping lime green tears

around both eyes,

a carrot for a nose

(some reported parsnip),

below which a clay pipe

drooped from a mouth

that was pure stroke victim.

A red woolen scarf trailed

in the meltwater drool

at his base, and he slumped

to starboard, kinked,

gone at the pelvis.

From the buffet deck

of a passing cruise liner

stag and hen parties shied

Scotch eggs and Pink Ladies

as he rounded the stern.

He sailed on between banks

of rubberneckers

and camera lenses

into a bloodshot west,

past islands vigorous

with sunflower and bog myrtle,

singular and abominable.
The Present


I shove up through the old plantation—larch

out of season, drab, drained of all greenness,

widowed princesses in moth-eaten furs—

and stride out onto the lap of the moor.

Rotten and rusted, a five-bar gate

lies felled in the mud, letting the fields escape.

Winter is late and light this year, thin snow

half puddled, sun still trapped in the earth,

sludge underfoot all the way to the ridge.

And no sign of the things I came here to find,

except in a high nick at the valley head

where a wet north-facing lintel of rock

has cornered and cupped enough of the wind

for dripping water to freeze. Icicles:

once, I unrooted some six-foot tusk

from the waterfall’s crystalized overhang,

lowered it down and stood it on end, then stared

at an ice age locked in its glassy depths,

at far hills bottled in its weird lens.

These are brittle and timid and rare, and weep

in my gloved fist as I ferry them home.

I’d wanted to offer my daughter

a taste of the glacier, a sense of the world

being pinned in place by a diamond-like cold

at each pole, but I open my hand

and there’s nothing to pass on, nothing to hold.
Nurse at a Bus Stop
The slow traffic takes a good long look.

Jilted bride of public transport,

alone in the shelter,

the fireproof bin and shatterproof glass

scrawled with the cave art of cocks and hearts.

It’s late, Friday, the graveyard shift, you’re ready

to dab blood from a split lip,

to hold the hand of cancer till the line goes flat.

Cardigan, sensible shoes, the kids

with a neighbor, fob watch pinned

like a medal to your breast.

Winter sharpens the day.

The centuries crawl past,

none of them going your way.