Poetry from the mountains

By

Going Downhill

By David J. Rothman



Once upon a time, after Rossignol had failed to come through with my new, first 220 downhills, / Forrest, for whom I worked with Vern and the boys tuning boards and fitting rental boots at Bell Mt. Sports / Got his old Austrian friend Willy, the Colorado Kneissl rep, to bring me a pair

Of the longest, sweetest White Stars you ever saw, just in time for the Sunlight downhill, / Presented to me like Excalibur over gemutlichheit in the tune room because Forrest and Willy loved racing, / Still hanging in my garage like a trophy rack lo these decades later, / And Willy had chosen well and those skis were like rockets. / I would put them on the snow and they would whisper like silk, wouldn’t even really turn / Until you hit about 35, and then it was as if a tiger had suddenly jumped under your feet / Crouched, and pounced and in mid-air you became the tiger, / Thinking only forward and down, steel claws sprouting, feeling the world unfold again and again / In a kind of slow splendor in which, surprisingly, nothing happened quickly, / Assuming you stayed upright, a good idea because as Klammer der Kaiser once pointed out, / When asked about falling, “Good downhillers don’t fall.” / And when the annual Town Downhill came around and was set on the course where we trained, Racer’s Edge at Tiehack, 1700 vertical and a mile long in less than a minute, / Dude, I have to tell you in the only language I can that I was way, way stoked, / Like a sizzling woodstove in a cabin at tree line stuffed with logs until it has started to glow. / Willy’s skis were quick, quick quicksilver, brushed, prepped and waxed to train rails on fire, / They spoke in a whisper that would rise to a quiet roar at about 50. / Twelve turns, that’s all, nice rhythm back and forth, a great launcher at the first drop / Where you had to remember that the trick isn’t the speed, it’s the acceleration, / Line it up, hands forward, turn when you see the top of the big pine and go, Then down, down the winding stair on purpose and free as a wave, / Like a primeval element, like a pure fact of mountain, thinking like it, transforming laws into play, / Until somewhere around 70 things would become quiet, calm, almost slow, / Nothing visible or mattering except the track, the line, where possibilities glittered / With the incorruptible structure of diamonds and the smallest articulations / Could move the earth like an enormous lever, or like what a hawk sees turning in his meditation / Of the distant boiling sun, almost outrun at last, everything passing by so quickly / That it has been forced to slow into silence and stillness, the world a statue, / Your body the fastest thing of any kind for miles around, your mind opened like a windsock / Or a naked eyeball, universal currents whispering along your edges About a freedom, a liberation, an unleashing of every

quantum wave’s options, / A moment that lasts forever in its purity, its utter touch and song, / Like a sequence of chords that opens a window somewhere, a woman singing… / Until suddenly time falls out of itself, bounces like an apple dropped on a hard wood floor, / You pull up and throw your skis sideways in a long sweet hockey skid and as the danger peels away / The world returns, comes back into the dull roar of becoming, as if you have stepped back down / Out of truth into a cave which is the same world but somehow more confusing / And your coach and friends come up to you and say “Nice run! You’re in 10th,” / And everyone else is standing around smiling and blissful as if they’ve just made love to the moon. / And then for the rest of the day it feels as if every hair on your body is singing, electric, / Every pore is aching to return to that province of transformation,

Every dark bud on your tongue claims to have tasted immortality, / No doubt the way they feel after a big day

riding giants at Sunset, Pipeline, Jaws, Waimea Bay or Mavericks,/ No doubt the way they feel after repairing bolts on the space station, or free soloing El Cap, / Or kayaking Lava at high water in the Grand or, as we all know it can be, making a new friend / Or falling in love or teaching a child how to add fractions, / When even in your dreams you are flying, flying, changed, alive, utterly in love with the world, Utterly compelled in the grip of its necessary gravity yet utterly willing, / Every obscure forest in which you find

yourself now merely a means to glide downward on

extended wings into the wildest grace.



David J. Rothman is the founder and editor of Conundrum Press, which published “The Geography of Hope: Poets of Colorado’s Western Slope” and other books by Colorado poets. A widely published poet and essayist himself, he lives in Crested Butte.





Inward Tears

By Elizabeth Riseden



The salt block goes untried

shrinking solely from snow.

The aspen, gnawed to its base earlier,

now fans out unshaped.

Currant bushes stand untrimmed.



The bedding ground below

sports no matted tussocks,

its rocky outcrops reveal

no hoof, no fresh shape of claw.



Winter once contained suspense,

expectation,

varied tracks and nibblings

vases of faith.



Quail, cheeky blue jays, an occasional magpie

fat with rabbit forage around the crabapple

attack seeded suet.

I appreciate them more now.



Yet the others were the pulse of my home—

deer, coyotes, barn owls, bald eagles.

I mourn their disappearance.

Grieve the sprawl that steals them.



Liz Riseden, now retired from college teaching, relishes writing poetry and fiction. A native of Nevada, she lives in Carson City.





Were It Not Winter

By Margaret Pettis



Were it not winter

I would not see

the nests of absent bird—

swinging little cups

of mud, horsehair and leaves

tied to barren boughs—

nor the prints of deer,

fox, and weasel

in their travels. I would

miss the cascade sculpture

of ice wreaths on branches

slung over the lake’s moody edge

undulating slush where geese

alight from their sky path.

And the silhouette of pines

on a white horizon,

the sharp edge of shadow

where precious light of day

meets the cold bright

need of winter.



Margaret Pettis teaches freshman English in Hyrum, Utah. A former wilderness ranger in the Sawtooths, she is a co-founder of the Utah Wilderness Association and the High Uintas Preservation Council.





On the Mountain

By Curt Harler



On the mountain

I fear more the nights of solitude

Than days of wind, arête, crevasse.

At night I meet my soul

My being, my future;

At night I see my life, myself

I see you and me.

I see the void, more than chasms in ice,

The void of the heart and soul.

Love traded for position, money.

An abyss deeper than 35-meter rope

That no jumar can ascend

Death, not of the body

But of the soul, the heart

Is what I fear on the mountain.



Curt Harler is an author, climber, and caver who lives in Strongsville, Ohio.





While Ski-touring

on the Wasatch Plateau

for Denise



By C.L. Rawlins



At dawn, the blue can lift from snow

to burn inside the measured chant of trees,

the pure, cold hue that centers flame.

Surrounded by the dark of shaggy limbs,

dead needles glow. This first, long hour

a double contrast binds the deep blues hard,

as matrix locks cool turquoise from the sky,

defines a moment, given stone.



My skis inscribe their shallow hieroglyph,

a trace to bear this wild-duck weight.

I hear the lectures I gave out, and lied:

the risk is always justified. In snow

there's no insistence and no fear.

And clean, spare time's worth dying for.



A half-mile on, false hemlocks bolt for sky

to lose their own deep shade, confront the sun,

handsome for their early lack of light,

hunger, paralleled, the heavy trunks

touch at root and needletip alone,

their high limbs bent with ripening cones.

I pick one, snake-tongued, from the snow

to keep: birth and death, a tyranny and all.



We heartily endorse the crowded tree,

whose noble body falls predictably, loads well,

accepts the saw, heartwood tightly-grained:

timber for the perfect house. Who's to say

what trees admire in trees?



Then, aspen, meaning avalanche

or fire cleared this ground: sapling aspen,

spinning beauty from the black earth-arc,

white sisters, scarred by tooth and horn.

Pale branches meet with the lilt of wrists

and each slim twig sets off, a daughter leaving home,

holds high, hard buds to the abalone sky.



I cross the sunrise line on hollow snow

and find a couloir through uncertain cliffs

of gray-green shale. The sunrise rockfall buzzes:

a hummingbird of stone could do a bullet's work,

alone, a flash of light. A sudden wind runs up

and sets claws in my back. Scared to turn away,

and face a hundred miles of nothing, I climb on.



The peak's a dome of hot, indifferent white,

abraded mirror to a windy sky. A jut of rock sustains

one bald, misshapen tree, false hemlock, spire-grained,

charred, carved by wind and snow, black frost and time.

Exile seed, sown by storm or bird, or one like me

who palmed a cone, brown talisman,

to fend off burning space.



A gust roars to the sun. I try

to find one word, to name or praise,

and touch, instead, the body of the fir,

witness to the turning earth, the sunsets,

darks, the mad array of stars,

ten lifetimes in this brutal light.



No knowing hand could ever bind

earth and sky in such a twist of loneliness,

give life, without a moment's choice.



C. L. Rawlins was born (and lives) in Wyoming. His poems have earned a Wallace Stegner Fellowhip at Stanford and a Western States Book Award. His work in the Wind River Range, monitoring air pollution, earned the USFS

National Primitive Skills Award.