WAXING SKIS GLIMPSING GOAT ROCK PEAKS
BREAKING ALL THE RULES WITH THE OLD IRON
MOUNTAIN’S OUT, SNOW SCOUTING SOLSTICE,
SUN-TIPPED WILD, RUNNING INTO SPRING
Skiing with children I’m almost free.
Cursed with the blood of Justice in the DNA,
seminal gift from my mother
Sometimes rolling over moguls with no care
shit-for-brains no more than shit-for-brains
It’s always there, though, fully present, lurking
ice sheets just beneath fresh powder light like baby’s
breath
reachable by my high-tech skis.
April Fool’s Day on the mountain
laughing with two eight year old boys
calling each other clowns in two languages
changing grandpa’s gender, laughing,
the discontinued language program
turns into the trigger
Alone in my office at High Camp
reaching for light in snow crystals
This is the journey to the hyphenated name
This is the journey to the hyphenated name
It turns out that empty space is not empty but full of stars
Skiing with children I turn into a changing fall line
greeted by trees, loyal ancestors permitting one like me
to enter them, path of ecstasy
Work so the tree won’t have to find its way again
This is the tree where the heart is nourished
The tree will orient you to the sun
Apprenticed to my mother all these years,
it was she who ruined me for life,
but Dean Brackley, S.J. in El Salvador
who gave me the image, Come to El Salvador
and be ruined for life, who would have imagined
these shapes on the mountain, Ellacuria and Sobrino
among them, God bless, as city children say
Skiing with children I’m almost free.
Cursed with the blood of Justice in the DNA,
seminal gift from my mother
Sometimes rolling over moguls with no care
shit-for-brains no more than shit-for-brains
It’s always there, though, fully present, lurking
ice sheets just beneath fresh powder light like baby’s
breath
reachable by my high-tech skis.
April Fool’s Day on the mountain
laughing with two eight year old boys
calling each other clowns in two languages
changing grandpa’s gender, laughing,
the discontinued language program
turns into the trigger
Alone in my office at High Camp
reaching for light in snow crystals
This is the journey to the hyphenated name
This is the journey to the hyphenated name
It turns out that empty space is not empty but full of stars
Skiing with children I turn into a changing fall line
greeted by trees, loyal ancestors permitting one like me
to enter them, path of ecstasy
Work so the tree won’t have to find its way again
This is the tree where the heart is nourished
The tree will orient you to the sun
Apprenticed to my mother all these years,
it was she who ruined me for life,
but Dean Brackley, S.J. in El Salvador
who gave me the image, Come to El Salvador
and be ruined for life, who would have imagined
these shapes on the mountain, Ellacuria and Sobrino
among them, God bless, as city children say
He called it his office, High Camp,
abutting the Goat Rocks, where he took children
on weekends with sandwiches in his backpack.
He’d sit on the second floor, 40-feet of windows,
where he wrote his frontier poems,
where he was going there were only strangers
Jim Bodeen
February-March-4 April 2014
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