Sound Verse
By NICK JONES and GREGORY HEIL

Editor's note: It's not every day that we receive good poetry. The following pieces were submitted separately as part of the Ski Sounds theme contest. We thought they deserved attention all their own, so here they are paired as a standalone feature.


The Sounds of Your Experience
By NICK JONES

Some rally you to rhapsody,
In tune with sweet days and bluebird moments.
The diminishing beat of the lift's bullwheel,
The shivering schuss away into a silent corrie,
Onto smooth running across blank snow that gently crumps below,
The sound thwump of a well stomped landing,
The deflation of a lift cushion when sitting back after the knee burner.

Some signify the shock.
They crescendo and attack and bring you down into a ball.
Face in the snow, listening to your winded lungs.
What caused this wheezing breath?
The silence of powder running is grabbed and throttled,
By a rocky sss-snag that scrapes steel and peels P-Tex.
Or the skittering clatter of edge grappling for bite on ice,
And failing, then falling into a slither of abrading Gore-Tex.



The Visage of Winter
By GREGORY HEIL

One day
the scrape of metal edges
over a slope of glazed ice,
and the roar of the lift
as it tirelessly ascends the mountain.

The next day
unutterable silence
of sparkling-white, untracked powder
below the outstretched arms of the native inhabitants,
which are adorned with priceless jewelry of white.




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