Bev Tappan

Category: White Mountain Poems

  • NORWICH YEARS: PINKHAM NOTCH

    A CHANGE OF MOOD

    (In Pinkham Notch)

    Winter nights can be too lonely

    To prolong.  I’m off the bunk

    And on the trail when the first blue glow

    Lanterns the snow, and the last

    Daystar flashlights over the ridge.

    I hear the falls before I reach them:

    Dark volcanic seethings

    Unseen beneath a polar carapace:

    Placid gravemounds of snow

    And brittle veils of frozen spray.

    The lodge windows are fireflies below,

    Heatless and harmless.  Above

    The next switchback a rosy white

    Spectre looms, brightens:

    Alpine snowfields fired by sunrise.

    Now my heels crunch stairsteps

    Down the path.  I relish

    The bounding pawprints of a weasel,

    The cascade’s vigorous mirth,

    The parade of pink clouds up the notch.

  • NORWICH YEARS: WINTER TRAILMAKING

    WINTER TRAILMAKING IN MT WASHINGTON VALLEY

    It’s the next thing to walking on water,

    Sinking snowshoes into drifts

    Of down almost out of sight,

    Lifting webbed feet easier than

    We thought but effortfully, white

    Ashes floating up like smoke,

    To take the next giant step

    On immaculate virgin territory.

    This cold day we see no  mouse prints,

    No trails of birdclaws like the tracings

    Of sandpipers playing tag with the tide,

    Only dents of icy missiles

    Windblasted into marble quilts.

    But look.  A raven evicted from pipe-frozen

    Flats above the treeline takes

    Lodging in a topless cage

    Of bare branches, querying us

    With raucous uncrowlike challenges.

    And by that wall a small red squirrel

    With straggly tail munches a pineseed

    Until we shift a pole and he

    Submerges into the briarpatch,

    Rockets up a hemlock and turbo-

    Drives across arboreal highways

    As silently as the beech leaves

    Flutter and scatter across the snow

    Onto our cross-stitched calling cards.