Winter Journey
Rails snake over the snow to some
distant point in op-arctic strokes;
narrow, neglected ledges are now bright diagonals
framing buildings, fixing whole
backdrops of dull brick in relief.
Dumps, coal heaps are hidden and
all the long, industry stained line,
that oil-black to London track,
lies sheathed in virgin white.
Here images glimpsed are immediate
like impressions, lightly sketched.
Beside the tracks, traces of ochre
stroked by some Japanese sable
imply grasses newly implanted
and a factory’s a pendant between
two washes of different white –
a pearl on an imperial breast,
a majestic mound of Muscovite domes.
But in this aquatinted emptiness
it was not sky flakes that fell to
drape and bury an unbeautiful world.
They are not snow drifts there settled
in sharp elbows round the chimneys
making purple shadows on the sheer white
roofs. They are just rucks in the paper
for no snow fell. It was the pure paper
that surfaced and sucked clean
the multichrome mess, daubed by men.
So sense is transformed in the suburbs,
but in the city the very surface
of the paper is so pocked and pitted
that no whiteness can ever emerge.
Snow here is churned like ash in the sugar.
like windscreen glass it litters the walk.
Here the permanent deep world of the grey
neither snow, time nor imagination changes.
David Perman lives in Ware, Hertfordshire, and has had two collections published – the latest, Scrap-Iron Words (2014) from Acumen Publications. He was a joint founder of Ware Poets and is the publisher of Rockingham Press. Twitter @david_perman