Matt Kirkham

Finnish Road Service Webcams 

It’s late but you cannot look away from the screen.
All the pines and snowdrifts and the black highways
within Finland refresh every thirty seconds.
The road stretches to the north and, so long as you watch,
nothing keeps on happening.  

With as many windows open on the screen
as you can, you are snagged on the Arctic Circle,
which at this time of night is no longer smooth
but jagged, like the silhouettes of pines
that cut across winter constellations, 

and so you Google Saami creation myths.
A truck is frozen as it crosses a causeway.
Thirty seconds here, thirty seconds there,
and then gone with its logs and the problem
of uncountability. There must be how many shoots,  

sundering their way into heliotropism
through ice crystals that deform and reform
near another location whose name
you cannot pronounce? Don’t look away.
Something might happen. Click on camera eighty-one,  

and it happens, you can hear it,
on camera eighty, splintering iron,
splintering ice and wood. The screen shudders.
Pixels the weight of snow fall from a branch
not far from    ̶̶̶ ̶  ̶  

Matt Kirkham is author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thirty-Seven Theorems of Incompleteness (Templar, 2019), which tells the story of the marriage of Kurt and Adele Gödel. He has had poems recently in Irish Pages, Abridged, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Poetry Wales, and, as of writing, is forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg. Born in Luton, living in Belfast, Matt work as a teacher.