Im Visits the North Pole - excerpts

Im throws open
windows
so that any
sunlight trapped

can escape before the year
turns dark and small

*

Of course Im encounters
death every day.

She removes a glove
to stroke a live

damp nose –
a huge husky perhaps

*

Between sheer walls
a joust
of narwhals

whisk through icing

*

Im lurks below
the treeline.

Everything is fur
and bristle and ire
– cries of owls, irks.

In the starkness of
perpendicularity
Im inspires a religion

of trees
whose spires
seek to bend

whose dead
limbs and needles
are her pyres

*

There is another.
Im salutes a furred
human face
over tundra,
young and
unfolded.
A moon
inside a boat.

He traverses the rink
of tundra. Im

writes her name
in the snow, sees
a bare tree
and two mountains.

Im Visits the South Pole - excerpts

Im listens for the babble
of internal organs, hers –

hearts, hot intestines
and suchlike.

Her bones are the ice
sculptures of Erebus

*

The sun a ring
– tambourine and cornet

the salt snow bakes.
A crust

and a cauldron
cone and rotunda

belly of breath
Im skims off –
fat off milk

*

Im plays at witching
forges molten snow
into a cat-shape

a grotto, grove of folded
paper animals, Im speaks
with her fingers

to annihilate them
unfold

*

A fold is an irrevocably
straight line
where white sheep live,
Im thinks

*

Snow like sand. Im
luxuriating, eyes closed,
loses her toes in it