The Trees


The trees help me to see
when Norrland has grown too white,
too brutally vanished
into morning-white anesthesia

The sun gives me orientation
in my winterland,
as long as it manages to shine through;
casts long shadows across the topography,
from gracefully hinted ridges
of boulders
to fallen pines over knolls

But when grey-white unedited rises
death-silent on the buoyancy of the atmosphere
over the region’s snow deprivation,
and hides the fire of the star’s eye,
existence is quickly dissolved,
and spacetime becomes a flotation-tank dream
far beyond all reach,
just as migraine aura loosens language
from grammar’s lingual chains
and shows life unmediated
& fleeting & terrifying

That is when the trees help me
with direction & with distance,
with here & there, with up & down
and the full elegance of balance,
on skis across the heights
toward Abborrtjärnhuvud & Lillsniptjärn

For when the ground is out of sight
the trees mark out my path,
like catch-arms assisting the storm-struck
beneath the sky-storm of Nallo

I pole forward, and there is resistance,
so Earth still has a surface,
somewhere in the wild dominion of dizziness,
yet vision remains hidden in white,
until the trees return my gaze its goal
and footing in snow’s white blind

The face feels numbed, mute,
as the body stands on its skis,
and the poles reach down somewhere

And without the trees I would be gone,
with air white with snow & haze,
the ground’s self-evidence vanished,
the ground I do not know where it is
down there in the whitest of white,
but the spruces stand steady
through the whiteout, and the pines as well;
grant a way home as retreat,
and the house appears
like the ship in the night;
a shadow with volume,
with weight & a front door
and at its center a crackling stove,
yes, an indoors
where everything is visible

Thank you spruce, thank you pine, thank you birch



Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin The PoetBay support member heart!
Written on 2026-02-20 at 18:37

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