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![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/2/f/6/2f64621c-dbc7-4420-a7e7-c11821a33957/attachment/92d34c9e2d0c6fe3069308d8c7b138d5.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/b/2/5/b2551129-f51b-43c5-b51c-17fb8102b329/attachment/d82e0734123a482a1701c3d7a3cb90b9.jpg)