POEMS From Interpretive Work
From Ice-Blink
Uncollected
|
Getting Out
How in love with myself I was
on the iced-over river, Alaska Range
sprawled miles around, skeered trails
of snowmachines across the low hills,
spruce and spruce and a few hours
of thin blue sky: the day.
Laced into three-pins, sweating
in the perfect ten above, skijor
harness snug on my hips, at last
I was in this February
air silent of most birds, not
in Anchorage's Tacoma-ness, its
five-lanes and conveniences, but
on skis, in the mountains, an old dog
pulling me toward a cabin of logs,
its weather door a thorning of nails,
point out, to deter bears.
Do you know this moment? When
you expand at last from the clench
of the daily, find yourself bodily glad,
at last discovering pride (or whatever word
we don't have for such pure chest-bursting) not
something to be stuffed into a pocket,
but vast and permissible.
|
