‘The Yeti’

I met the Yeti in Tibet. In the Lhakpa La, by the Rongbuk glacier, northeast of Everest, we met.

I: [the ice in my eyes] … Dad?

And, he: [doing seemingly nothing but shuffling around in the snow]

He was, I knew, founded on grains of truth. Host to his parasites, scalp to hallux, hair of neither fox nor bear. His breathing the blue air of twenty thousand feet.

Shape and shade, of upright bearing, his melting prints in megapixels, the mountain misting like a mirror.

I met the Yeti in Tibet. I saw him in the Himalayas.

 

COMMENT

Jeremy Noel-Tod teaches in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is currently researching a history of the prose poem in Britain.

I wrote this poem for Carrie Etter’s The Pleasures of Prose Poetry course. The exercise was to describe in detail an encounter with a non-native animal in its native habitat. I freely admit to having only met the Yeti on the Internet.