I'm an avid cross-country skier — not a racer in spandex cranking laps on some perfectly groomed course, but a guy breaking his own random trail through meadows and forests, pausing to check on buried boulders and swerving animal tracks, noting the tones and textures and timbres of the season.
For me, the goal of skiing isn't skiing; that's just a means to an end. Though I do love the athletic effort and sporty glide, the actual goal, or end, is nature itself: intimate contact, a kind of elemental presence. As the name suggests, my style of cross-country skiing is all about the country.
Robert Bly, a Minnesota poet who definitely knows a thing or two about wintry landscapes, titled his first book (published in 1962) Silence in the Snowy Fields. I appreciate that title very much — the haiku-ish quality, the conjuring of a vast, gentle, moody terrain that is both external and internal, located in the place and in the poet alike.
Nevertheless, I believe that Bly got one part wrong: silence. His poems are made of language, of speaking, are they not? No matter how far we travel into the hushed emptiness of a snowy afternoon, a human voice accompanies us: blathering inanities, singing weird songs, cursing achy toes and fingertips, perhaps occasionally uttering something beautiful.
Over the past few winters, I've made it my habit to "transcribe" this voice, which is to say I've been jotting down my own little plein air poems. Every Sunday between December and March, I click into my trusty Rossignols, grip my old-school bamboo poles and head out solo, carrying in my backpack a beer, a puffy jacket, a notepad and a pencil. I wander aimlessly for a couple hours, plop down in a drift, pull on the puffy and crack the well-earned beverage. Woodpeckers drum. Clouds soften to pink with the sunset. Shivering, teeth chattering, I wait for stanzas to arrive, scribbling them quickly.
This ecopoetic practice is, again, a means to an end; it's a technique for tricking myself into slowness, attentiveness, appreciation of the scene's infinite detail. My pencil, I've come to realize, is a kind of ski — yet another tool for exploring the country. Below are a few samples from my ongoing project.
A selection of Sunday ski poems for Seven Days by Leath Tonino
**
when i sit here
i sit with a big view
mountains
sky
distant trees
and i sit
with a small view
twigs
snowflakes
toes of my boots
and i sit with a view
between these two
that i don't know
how to describe
it looks
like nothing
cold
i suppose
would be the closest word
**
jittery with cold
cursing in the quiet
of my mind
i watch winter light
that can't be named
close the day
and open the night
alpenglow
i suffer for you
i freeze for you
i call out to you
but of course
you ignore me
almost as if
i'm not here
**
someone skied way out here
where i like to ski
and built a snowman
he stands alone
in the white meadow
between the creek
and the mountain
facing west
i have never built
a snowman way out here
but it strikes me
that sunday after sunday
sunset after sunset
this is somehow
exactly what i have done
cold without noticing the cold
thinking the kind of thoughts
most people refuse to call thinking
there he stands
facing west
transfixed by the slow magic
day becoming night
**
i'm out here for the shapes
i'm out here for the colors
i'm out here for the warmth
i'm out here for the cold
i'm out here for the changes
the line i ski through change
then i sit
make myself a dot
it's not the line's end
but a new beginning
this sitting
i'm out here for this sitting
i'm out here for the outside
coming inside
turning me
inside out
**
snow blows
across snow
and i go deeper
into my puffy coat
squint against this
rushing place
numb fingers
numb toes
dusk finds me
sheltering in spruce
in the heart's
last heat
and i didn't even know
dusk was looking
**
out drinking on saturday
lots of people
loud music
wild dancing
the lights
the lights
and now this beautiful
quiet sunday
all snowy mountains
and passing thoughts
and changing light
won't-stay light
can't-stay light
thank-you light
**
hey guys
darn
i'm sorry
i mean
i'm not sorry
but i feel
kind of foolish
to have sat here
for an hour
and not said hello
how you doing
you're looking
totally great
as always
or maybe even
better than usual
this snow
is something special
really something special
it's piling up
pretty good
on you
on me
on everything
it's what got me
all distracted
this past hour
but you know
how it is
you're spruce
you live out here
**
smoking my pipe on a cold winter afternoon
watching smoke curl away
feeling it rise
through bare branches
rise through
and disappear
ah
this delicate touch
this soft reaching out
from my shivering
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