"Mountain Dance"

E. A. Hanninen - 2008

  Alicia Hoffman

                    This Earth is Not a Novel

at all, but small and fine like the lines flowing
from a ball point pen; our lives are being crafted

carefully, the paper we rest upon is more
like a poem about a snow-capped mountain

in Alaska, about how we dance there
on its crags and warm our bodies as characters

light fires that glow near the crevasse, about
how we learn to speak the language

of snow: utvak, pirta, muruaneq — snow carved
in block, light snowstorm, soft deep snow.

And as the snow fades to damp rain,
(kanevvluk) I am ready to be convinced

there will always be more stanzas, that
the poets will continue to master the language

of alder, aster, iris and the flakes will continue
to drift and curve the stems in the vowels of snow.

Arts & Crafts Menu Border - Ca. 1910

Alicia Hoffman holds an MA in Poetry from the State University of New York at Brockport and currently teaches English Literature at Bishop Kearney High School. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, Red Wheelbarrow, and Remark, as well as the online journals Poetry MidWest, The Flask Review, Whimperbang, Flutter Poetry Journal and Poets Against The War.


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