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![Such a Birthday, Marie-France (2006)
Birthdays? Who counts them?
Too many? Who cares?
Troubles? Surmount them!
No elevator? Take stairs.
Pebble hurts you in your shoe?
Shake it, take it home with you.
Maybe it’s a thing you need
(for some necklace came this bead).
Birthdays? They’re one way to know
why your life has taught you so.
“Taught me what?” did you ask?
POOpaTApik! That’s your task!
[*The Bard of Montparnasse strikes again. 21.02.2006*]](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/c/f/4/cf4414d5-770d-47e8-9e35-de574d0b280c/attachment/aa1e942b1e24bf7263dce9176fd9c1b7.jpg)
![TRACKS ... (contd)
p. 2
In three seconds
she had tracked a [mountain] blue peak
far beyond the friendly babble
and well-tried arm
that straightened her.
She stood up--rearranged
around her changeless center:
brushing from her mind a diamond phrase
about the hole she’d made.](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/4/3/7/437f69ec-e08c-4515-b538-319a872b43c6/attachment/7d76cc2321db950a8f635f9093e87c47.jpg)
![Fair copy of a poem written in Paris 1-14 March 1985; changed 18 March 10:45 p.m.—2:00 a.m., 19 March 8:45a.m.—9:13; 12:30 p.m.—1:13.
[CROSS-COUNTRY] TRACKS, FOR A [MIDDLE-CLASS GIRL] BOURGEOUIS WOMAN
by J. A. Emanuel
High in [Austrian] alpine snow,
[her awkward] cross-country skis at awkward rest
to imitate the guide [*on a line by itself*]
she looked back suddenly, [felt surprisingly] surprised to feel
the downward mountain pulsing in h er eyes:
“a mystical experience,”
Wordsworth himself had said,
[the] this blank-ribbed surface of her past,
placeless as sky whirled upside down--
only clouds to slow her feet [again],
no gripping path
except the rutted trail behind them
its whiteness rearranged by bluer air.
A trance-like [quiet] quiet
palmed away her friend’s bright [phrase] talk
[left] from space the guide’s new voice [fit perfectly] spreads through
like quick-dry brush brushstrokes
[finishing] re-coloring the portrait she had sat for
all her life:
“Perhaps you’d like,” he said,
“to make tracks of your own.”
The sunshine-frame of it
[beamed out a splendor] braced the instant
[for the instant] needed by her waking skis
to plunge, her willing body following,
her [waking] shining senses leaping downhill[,]
to clinch[ing] the risk, the dare,
exhilaration blinded to the rock that rose
and jerked her headlong underneath the snow--
a [quiet] trap-door disappearance, a [soft] swallowing.
Panic pushed her friend--the guide already there--
to the nothingness above her,
anxiety a shrilling vapor
until a rosy-tasseled cap,](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/9/e/0/9e09a46c-877a-44d2-952b-e9ac46315851/attachment/d527a081197f01e5984481fcb0fa02d8.jpg)