Lapland
for Irina

Lichen on rock, the green-blue Loschian
matrices of a city in the dark seen
from a point of view out of space or in the future
and the yellow acid the very dream of us,
snow, virgin, then the blue hare like the candied
bridegroom, waiting, expectant boughs
of silver birch slope with Newtonian forces,
then the gravity of spring pulls, Nature
awakens at the microscopic and macroscopic
economies of existence, and I am a man without glasses
without a watch, a man running a high fever,
would the Lapland landscape write for me
as Mexico did for Octavio Paz, the owl turns
its head to take in the lamentable lemmings
commuting to death, the arctic fox changes its coat,
keeps fashionable, would go well with a Louis Vuitton
bag, come roll in the snow, as a Francis D'Assisi,
the sky a washed denim blue, the trees in the wonderful
Kodak color, love is here somewhere, is it so easy to pluck
from Nature an allusion? The red rowan berries signify
                                                                             something,
would they do, or back to the lichen the polygonal hope
of the geometrician, find the pi for loving; I am lost
in the metaphysics and metaphors of slipping ice, slushing
                                                                             snow, in the
calls of arriving birds, I drown in the crevice of wanting you.

By Stephen Pain

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