Blessed are the piste makers
 

Blessed are the piste-makers

Steep above the woodpiles, trees and houses,
our yellow bubble, rising,
follows other yellow bubbles in a row,
climbs the tiered wedding cake, the royal icing,
over dark and studded slabs of cliff,
to strike the blue, the white, the glare and glow.

Below us are believers, practising their lines.
Vouchsafed the space to meditate on scripture,
they follow paths that are already written.
And sign their sinuous inscriptions.

Uncoupled, then the slow-down slide of doors,
the top and out. The ticking off
of helmets, zips and buckles,
goggles, poles and gloves.

The clattered slap of skis on pack
and sprung trap clicking in. We push
into the wide bright world.

A fresh-made bed which creaks beneath us,
teeters on the brink that thrills to meet us.
We hang and gulp at where it leads to,
shocked at what it shows:

a map, as big as the mountain,
of all that lies ahead.
Here be dragons. Fear and fortune,
waiting to be read.

A shy exchange of looks, a question asked.
The softest shrug towards the deep, and down
we go. We know there is no coming back.

A quickening toward the edge, a running out of room.
Lean in, look round for refuge and you ground.
Lean out, look straight and make your fate your own.

From fits and starts of danger, safety, danger,
we knit a lithe calligraphy. We learn
to carve a stroke that feeds upon the fall,
and keeps us cradled in a cursive turn,
continuous, unpunctuated, endless.

Each planted bend digs in against the curd.
The sun behind our backs throws shadows
from our feet. Confetti scatters
right above our shoulders.
Right and left and right among
the moguls and the rollers.

The playing out and reeling in,
of poise and peril, self-belief
and panic, coax the yo-yo’s spin,
transforming force to flow, squeezing movement
from momentum. Load rebounds as lift
and scores another flourish on the script.

I have dreamed of flying.
We are skimming, sliding
together on the edge of air,
deliberate, undying.

And though we’re not the first to try this way,
-- others have rehearsed it all before
and know it like a psalm – it still wants saying.
It begs a proof, a puzzle to resolve.

We pause to get our breath and giggle.
The girl invites her brother to outsmart her.
He chases down her laughter
as it calls across the hill.
Carefully, we follow after.

A fairground chair swings round to take us on.
The skittered rasp of edge on corduroy and ice,
the wind and scrape and whooping are all gone.
Its rumble makes a quiet, quiet promise
of more. And more to come.

Another poem that isn't sure what it wants to be when it grows up. Probably too long and more detail about skiing than any non-skier could reasonably be excited by.

It's about skiing as marriage and vice versa, isn't it? That's my first time read, from a one-time skier (and, so far, a one-time marrier).

So far, I'm enjoying it, but first reads are superficial. Mine are, anyway.

I'll be back.

David

.
This is quite ambitious! I like it very much. As David says, there's interplay between skiing and marriage but it's the details that make it a tightrope walk of an analogy. In a nutshell, shorten it.

S6: Though I like it, I think you might either consider re-writing this stanza or doing without it.
First, I'm having a hard time parsing it. Is the map referring to what the last line in S5 is setting up? And if so, does that stanza (S5) need to end with a colon?

"A map, as big as the mountain," is a perfect description of those big billboard maps at the base and summit of skiing mountains. There's nothing quite like them. They are gigantically, unambiguously clear in one sense but still cannot convey the experience they represent. The same can be said of wedding vows, I think. The analogy is great. I don't think you need a comma after "map". The stanza as a whole feels like it has derailed itself from the rest of the poem and gone off into fantasy.

Which stanzas/sections you chose to delete/condense is hard to say. I'd have to spend more time with it. I do think the poem is weighed down in too many words. Taken as individual units, all the stanzas are beautifully conceived and work well at covering every angle of the analogy between downhill skiing and the long haul of marriage. You clearly have a vision and are squeezing everything you can out of it. But it is likely too much. As is so often suggested by critiquers here, find a path to say more with less I think is in order here. You might start by looking at S7-11. Find a way to say in one stanza what you are saying in four stanzas.

I'm looking forward to seeing you navigate this often dangerous expert trail of revision you are now on. Stay over your skis and I'll see you at the bottom : )

.

Joe, I have to first say something that may sound like an excuse but isn't. I've sometimes have trouble concentrating and it seems to be a little worse the last couple of days. So maybe that's why I'm having so much trouble understanding this poem. I've read it several times and picked up that there is skiing and a couple and some Christians? I think they're on a Ferris Wheel at the end. I also think it's essentially a poem about loving your partner? But I'm having trouble bringing it together as a whole and am not sure if what I think I see is right.

The pace slips close to what I think of as "one damn thing after another." It moves by so fast it is hard to hold onto what should be held. Maybe some of the actions, and events, could be taken out and more focus applied to one or two? That would slow the pace and give more space to let out what you want to come out.

That's all I have right now. I do want to see it change and maybe will have more to add as it does.

I love it. I think this poem is meant to be read aloud. So much assonance and alliteration, rhyme and near rhyme. It is long, but I don't think it's TOO long. And the pace is fast - like skiing downhill! I need to read it many more times, but I don't mind a bit; it's fun.

Annie

PS I had no idea what a piste maker was. I had to Google.

My brief attention span balks at longish poems, and this one bewildered me with its profusion of analogies, metaphors and wordplay, but I won’t say it’s too long or too much. Those who think so may be right, but I found the course exhilarating. The skiing/marriage analogy is cleverly drawn and intertwined with a third strand: lines of writing, scripture, calligraphy.

The unpredictable rhymes and line lengths work for me and add to the sense of openness and adventure, but S2 disoriented me with its “paths that are already written.” I almost thought the adventurers were both literally and figuratively looking down on habit-bound “believers,” but S13 set me straight. I also thought “practising their lines” might refer, inter alia, to rehearsing vows before the wedding, but that’s another false lead.

A couple of my typically trivial nits:

- S1L1 should probably end with a comma.

- S14L2 should probably end with a period and the following line with no punctuation.

- The “yo-yo’s spin” seems an odd, comical metaphor for skiing, but that’s a non-skier speaking. The skiing lingo didn’t lose me, btw.

Among many fine lines, I was struck by the last line of S1.

.
Same here. In the States we call the equipment Snow Guns (we have a thing with guns) and Trail Groomers (we have a thing with grooming, too).

What I forgot to mention in my previous comment was that the title plays off the Christian Beatitudes: "Blessed are the peacemakers" which fits nicely with the poem's conceit.

.

Thanks for finally sending me to Google, Jim. Turns out I didn’t know what it was either. I know what a “piste” is and thought “piste-maker” was coined for the pun and meant “pathbreaker.” It’s that adventurous sense, I think, that misled me in S2. As for the pun, I’m having trouble reconciling the thrill and daring of the poem with the meekness and mournfulness blessed in the Beatitudes, but the cleverness of it overrides such niggles.

Looking for this poem again, I was surprised to track it down in non-met. I’ve seen some poems recently that could go either way, but this ain’t one of ’em. It’s strongly iambic, and imo heterometric does not a non-met make.

Thanks all for taking a look at this. I was curious to see how much of it would connect.

It began as a fairly straightforward effort to convey the fun I’ve had learning to ski. I was 50 when I first went with the family and my eldest was 10. So it all started rather late for me. I absolutely loved it, and have been every year since then. Sadly, my skills have never progressed much beyond poor, but I have set my sights on making it to “average” one day.

The title is my own little joke on the Beatitudes. The poem began there. It seemed natural to weave in some more holy references (skiers can get oddly evangelical), and scripture leads to inscription and that leads back to the tracks that skis carve into the piste. The wedding cake simile began as a simple observation from a ski gondola, but since skiing has been at the heart of so many happy times for me over the past 20 years in the company of family and friends, it seemed natural to extend the metaphor.

Hi David, thanks for stopping by. Yes, those are the themes. Life is one long skiing trip.

Jim. The “map as a big as a mountain” does follow on from the previous stanza, so I have taken on your suggestion and ended S5 with a colon. They do put up enormous piste maps outside the skilift stations. I also meant the stanza to imply a sense that the view of the ski trails you get from the top (esp on chair lift) themselves look like life-size maps, being pure bold white and working their way through dark woodland. And the prospect the map opens up is one of excitement and apprehension ahead of you -- right now or further along in life’s adventure.

You (& John) are very probably right that I need to lose a hunk from S7-11. They are all about the peculiar mechanics of skiing in which at one moment you are bracing against centrifugal force and the next are wholly unweighted as you move across to the next turn. I am likely to lose the reader by getting too self-absorbed by it. But thanks for appreciating the detail. It’s a matter of deciding which of the darlings is pruned away.

No need to apologise John. There may be less going on it than you think. Much of it is about learning to master and embrace an extended fall and to turn into something graceful (or in my case something survivable). So its less “one damn thing after another” than the same thing said slightly different ways. At the end the narrator and companion are carried off to the next adventure by a ski chair lift which always strikes me as a sort of fairground ride, so why not a ferris wheel?

Thank you for the thumbs up Annie. I also think I can read it out loud in a way that sounds better than it looks on the page.

And (Carl), unless I’m sticking strictly to a well known form I’m never quite sure whether it should go in metrical or non-met. Eg Unless I’m trying to write a limerick then my natural default is iambic, and there are usually rhymes and alliteration. The line lengths tend to vary and when posted in metrical they sometimes attract questions. I’ll happily go where I’m told.

S2 adopts the metaphor taken from the title, implying skiers (believers) on the piste below the lift are part of some strange sect performing odd manoeuvres on the snow and repeating them over and over for the greater glory of whomever. And the “practising their lines” does indeed have the connotation of going over your wedding vows, as well writing your own signature on the already written piste.

Thanks for spotting the typos, now corrected.

I guess the yoyo is an unlikely metaphor. (Skiers rarely head back uphill!) but there is a sense of repeated tension and rebound.

Piste-makers. More typically called piste bashers or groomers in UK circles. But the sense of piste making as diligent human endeavour is also there. And I hoped the quiet ending might be an echo of the actual beatitude “Blessed are the peace makers.”

Thanks again

Joe

.

The map is where I think the poem resides (though you make no specific mention of marriage in the comment)

The question is: who are the piste-makers in the metaphor?

.

Hi Jim,

Yes the map is key. It opens up the future and spreads out the places you might go and what could happen on the way..

Marriage isn’t explicitly mentioned but there is a wedding cake, a bed and confetti. And kids do turn up and disappear again.

The piste-makers might be thought of as the heavy lifters, those pioneers that went before us, and those who keep it (ski resorts, society, life) all working and to whom we should be grateful.

But the poem is mainly about skiing!

I realise I haven’t done much with it in response to comments. I had hoped to shorten it and maybe clarify. I think I am least satisfied with S9, the one with the “Lean out, look straight, and make your fate your own” which sounds uncomfortably close to Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for life”. Hmm. I did try deleting some bits, but I don’t think I have made it any better yet. So, I may stop torturing it and just let it rest for now.

Cheers

Joe

… and “a question asked” and a “quiet promise.”

The title explained itself to me at once. I think it's better than the one Monty Python came up with for Life of Brian.

You don't really need any more comment from me - you've had some great ones from other people - and I can't follow you into the intricacies of the skiing terms, but I think it's a great conceit which you seem to have kept up all the way through.

I'm not sure why we haven't been again since our first trip. There seemed to be an awful lot of palaver about the preparations etc. Maybe that was it. We did enjoy it, though, that one time. In Finland, so it was beautiful. I had (then) quite a good sense of balance, so I pretty much learned to ski on day 1 but didn't learn how to stop on day 3. Day 2 was really interesting. I ended up in the car park more than once. (Bounced off quite a nice BMW on one of those occasions.) Then there was the time I mistimed my smooth move from slope to ski-lift and was knocked to the ground by the next empty seat ...

Anyway, good poem. It works well.

Cheers

David