White (excerpt)
After the theatre, stirred by song and story,
we watch the winter stars from the balcony.
Five floors down from our room in the hotel,
two ice-floes in flux on flow. Each candela
is a mute swan asleep, as white, as luminous
on the black waters of the bay as ice.
Stilled at the edge of the Severn's turbulence
and the tangled waters of two river currents,
their whiteness the definition of lumen,
swans paired for life, a cob and his pen,
wings and necks folded in one dream,
and all the colours of white, which only seem,
Sujata, the very opposite of the blackness
of your black squirrel in Caracas,
but are the same, the one
white rainbow, black, one spectrum.
All the spare light in the world is stored
in the folded wings of a pair of sleeping swans,
all the world's spare water stacked miles deep
in the waking ice of the glacier.
The last star dissolves at the lost edge of the moon
afloat on blue like Arctic ice, loosening.
At last a change in the weather.
Frost gives up its grip,
ice eases in the bones of trees.
There is movement in the air,
the Atlantic on the wind's breath,
a touch of rain beginning.