Polar Bear

A pile of stones and old snow
has got up out of a hollow
under the rusty hill
and become bear.
He’s a large male, tribe of one,
dragging his feet
along contours of loose scree
to the tip of the island
then rounding the point.
Hasn’t eaten in months;
the heavy boulders and worn rocks
of his haunches and shoulders
grind with each step
and a sludgy paste
of rubble and grit
churns in his gut,
but the bear in the bear in the bear
keeps padding on, wheeling
the battle-cannon of body, neck and head
to the next front.
He’s a patch of off-white
on a skewbald mountain undressed by heat,
or a vague cloud-shadow
fording a glacier,
tramping the rotting carcass of ice
between coasts.
Lumbering down to a gravel beach
he’s a nomad in vintage fur,
the coat too heavy, too baggy, too hot
since the sun got stuck in the sky.
At the water, the fleet of life-rafts has sailed.
He’ll circle the Pole again,
follow his [own] scent
into [smaller and] tighter corners,
along pencil-line ledges,
bed down in his own pawprint
as Ursa Minor rotates overhead.
Or he’ll reach up
and cling by a single claw
to the ceiling hook of the North Star
til it dissolves.

(Simon Armitage, Cryosphere, pp. 7-8)