Jon Wolston's Poetry Archive

Smiling in May light
yellow as her umbrella:
a nameless beauty.

In a poem, Jon?
What’s wrong with you?

You know, I’ve been asking myself that very question,
giving my harness bells a shake
like Robert Frost’s horse,
wondering if there is some mistake.

That summer it was far easier
to simply pretend it had never happened,
face afire, thinking it queer
that Peter and David Van Etten lay convulsing on the lawn,
the longest evening of the year.

Do you see the blessing, how we all let go?
Do you see we were transfigured
and how it threw us all?
Do you tell yourself, “Giddy-up, brother ass?”

Do you promise yourself miles of lovely darkness
before sleeping?

I     The climb up lasts forever.
Skis slung on our backs
we kick steps up six hundred feet
in a proud laborioso,
filled with easy chatter
under noon’s blue dome.

II     The descent begins–
a placid three-turn glissando,
skis sliding across April corn
like butter knives spreading Velveeta.

III     Then before I can blink
my Karhus slide sideways
up into the air over my head
and my shoulders start plowing mush
straight towards the rocks my mind remembers–
a two-hundred-pound tumbleweed
courting death in a fateful accelerando.

IV     One thought erupts with force:
You have to stop yourself.
I lash at the snow pack with my poles
in a relentless stacatto
and watch my mounting kinetic energy
bend them into sickening arcs.

V     Five hundred feet down
my right ski spears a mogul and holds,
as I flap around it in a helpless furioso
like a flag in a gale. Bones torque out
and decide to stay together.

VI     My ski buddy Dr. Jane
makes it down The Claw
with far less fanfare,
in time for the dying strains
of my ego’s pianissimo requiem.
She’s off in a swirl
and I hobble down Mount Washington alone,
re-spinning this bright yarn of pride.

Newcomers enter.
Wailing tots sound off downstairs.
Then, a suckling noise.

Mere doormen last week,
my fleets of mercenaries
wear plastic sandals.

Chits for house and car
await you in Tripoli—
name your sons Muammar.

That Stanley was born
in Germany is killing
me and my brother.

We double over
while Mom hoses manure
out of her woody.

Leaping Black Zeta won’t learn to sit.
Feral, she slashes at cuffs and sleeves,
merciless in her bold advances.
Some day her rough tongue
will lap my face with unabashed tenderness.
Until then I will live on acorns
in a stout underground cage.

All wiry bat ears
fully grown at sixteen pounds
she paws the wet clay.

What does this woman know
that lights up the curves
of her face that way,
like piecrust right out of the oven,
as if she just hit
your best red-devil fastball
clean out of the park
before you even threw it,
bringing one-hundred-and-twenty thousand roaring fans to their feet
while you just hang your head sweating
and kick the dirt
and say, “Shucks”
the way Jimmy Carter did
on that Saturday Night Live skit
during the energy crisis
when Muss Lullian clutches her chest
and falls off the generator bike
powering the broadcast from the Oval Office
and the screen goes blank?

Scraping off our cars
she tells me a dream about love
with a long gestation period.

No sooner are the windows clear
than they ice up again.

As my hood fringe whitens
I launch into “Ramparts”
in James Wright’s gravelly voice,
forgetting the best lines
but not too late to remember them
and tack them on
and feel my chagrin melting
under winter’s swift white wings.

We get a handle on the elements
and go on our way defrosted,
each peering ahead through the radiance
of hearts on fire
under blankets
of snow too deep for words.