The Method

In the retirement card i wrote

To my mother, I cited the story of the man

Who skied every day for three thousand

Days, eight years, or roughly ten percent of life

Of a man with skin as leathery, white

Hair on end poking through the edges

Of his wool hat.

I hate to sound fatalistic to a woman

Who just spent forty years teaching

Children, her Shakespeare poster alive

Decades before the seniors who slept

Through her wise lessons as her hair grayed.

But eventually the way we spend time transcends

Mere hobby or pastime or career,

Time elapsed enough to call it something more

Like the way we spent this one wild and precious life--

a quote she read at every graduation--

The method we employed between birth and death.

Spend enough moments stacking copies of othello in the white cabinet

Or sliding in a controlled manner down slopes of frozen water,

And they will say you lived your life

In just the way he took those last turns

On day 2570 of skiing,

A wave of ice crystals sloshing side to side,

The sun's tiny shadows in the texture of the snow.