Sliding on Barn Hill in the Dark of the Storm
Donald Junkins
We bite the ice balls off our mittens with our teeth,
run head starts and belly-bump our Flexible Flyers
down, past suppertime. The snow turns to sleet, Keith
Berry cries, "It's getting slipperier and slipperier!"
and races Rusty Hultzman to the McGanns' front
steps. One more run, just one. Rusty is game:
sweaty, played out, on a dare he touches the blunt
of his tongue to his sled-runner, a piece of skin comes
off, but he's happy. "This is the nuts," he says
over and over, and soon: "I gotta go home." One by one
the ice-crusted players drift off in the dead
of the storm. I'm alone with Janice McGann: "Fun, fun,"
she says and breasts her sled before me down the hill,
and up and down again before I tackle her,—
"Let me go," and I do, and run with my sled untilmy ice-clogged overshoes drag me down. A blur
of icy wool shoves in my face, then against my naked throat
a winter wooly crab, ice-pinching, — I grasp
my frozen claws around her: "Let me go," our lobster coats
buckling: shedders in December, out of season in the rasp
of winter. I will not let her go as the sleet turns to hail
on little Barn Hill ten miles north of Boston in 1945:
Janice, I kiss you still, the ice pelts our foreheads blue snails,
waves of small round snails bouncing and rolling, alive
on the glassy crust, pelting our short quick kiss, our light
kiss, our melting icy kiss, then I let you go —
and then I let you go. Down we crunch toward the bright
lights in the houses below and say, "So long," "So
long," in the dark. I drag my sled past the high street
lamp at Garfield and Cleveland as the hail burns into sleet.
With the snow and hail and sleet and cold that have suddenly (finally) found their way to Connecticut (and most of the country), I found myself paying extra close attention to this poem, an inscribed, framed broadside of which hangs in my house. It’s by my mentor and dear friend, Don Junkins, who sadly left us several years ago. The first thing I hear is his voice, that clear, high baritone, that slight New England lilt, see his big, sly grin, those sparkling, deeply knowing eyes. It’s remarkable how a good poem, written from the deepest heart somehow conveys along with it the whole character of a person—and I can only hope that some of the words I put down on the page will contain and convey me back to those who have known me well when I’m gone.
The poem, as with so much of his poetry, explores an important memory, but then takes that memory and pushes it toward other mysteries and wonders. With so much literature and poetry that lingers on the sad, the tragic, it was good to delve into a poem so filled with joy and celebration on this very cold, January day.
One thing I always notice about the poem, and this has something to do with the stanzas being side by side in its framed version on my wall, are the symmetrical, 15 line stanzas, the second stanza a recasting or reshaping of the other, the simple preamble, “until” launching the second stanza. Just as the snow transforms to something both itself and wholly new, other emotions transform in the poem—the childish joy of careening down a hill on a sled morphing into the power and all but overwhelming sensation of awakening into sexual attraction. That early, childish joy of the first 15-line stanza is retained in the second stanza, however—as he kisses Janice McGann—is somehow still a part of it, the whole thrill of it, even as the transfiguration of the snow into other incarnations of water occurs—and even as the second set of 15 lines reflects and echoes the first 15 lines.
Another thing I always notice in this poem is the care taken with the line breaks. Lines roll and tumble forward into the next, often ending mid-idea, mid-expression: “…races Rusty Huntsman to the McGanns’ front / steps…” “…on a dare he touches the blunt / of his tongue to the sled runner…” “…out of season in the rasp / of winter…” The momentum of the words themselves echo and mirror the “up and down again,” frenetic movement of the characters in the poem who “run head starts and belly bump” and “breast sleds” and “tackle” and “drag…down.” The words tumble along like so many sledders, sliding, gliding into each other down along the page, bringing us back to, celebrating this day in 1945.
I also frequently pause in front of this poem hanging in the front hallway of our home and take note of the rhyme, trying to see if I can find a formal “scheme” at play. The first 4 lines are in an ABAB pattern, “teeth…Flyers…Keith…slipperier,” but in the next 4 lines, while “front" and “blunt” rhyme, “game” and “come” are a slant/near rhyme, and from here, the order unravels still further. “One” and “fun” rhyme, but “dead” and “hill” aren’t even close, though “hill” finds its rhyme two lines later in the final line of the stanza with “until.” The second stanza settles into a more structured rhyme form, with ABAB rhymes in lines 2-5: “throat…coats,” “grasp…rasp,” and again in lines 6-9: “hail…snails,” “1945…alive,” and in lines 10-13 “light…bright,” “go…So,” ending with the rhyming couplet, “street…sleet,” as if the poem has morphed into (found itself becoming) a classical 14-line, love sonnet (just as the snow has morphed into something else, just as the second stanza, the whole emotion of the moment has become something else).
Some other things I love about the poem:
The unnecessary words “with our teeth” in the first line. “Bite” already implies “teeth,” but that extraneous prepositional phrase pulls me instantly into the mind of a child, just as the memory pulls Junkins back to that time. Denoting the teeth shows how alert he is to finding the things that give the sensations.
“down, past suppertime.” The confluence of movement and time here. Can you sled “down past suppertime”? Yes, in a sense that’s what you are doing, staying out too late, past when you told your parents you’d be home, but the way it’s written makes it seem almost like time travel, as if that downward motion were magically moving you through space and time—down there at the bottom of the hill is past suppertime. It resides down there, somehow. This also speaks toward the way the childish mind apportions time and reminds me of the only rule my siblings and I and a pack of friends had to follow as we would set forth back in my own childhood: “Be home by suppertime.”
“I grasp my frozen claws around her…our lobster coats buckling….blue snails, waves of small round snails…” Throughout the second stanza the language becomes richly associative and wholly metaphoric. His hands are not “like frozen claws,” the hail doesn’t look like “blue snails.” His hands are claws; the hail is blue snails. And this latter metaphor is especially fascinating as the word “snails” rhymes with “hail.” The metaphor here seems to grow as much out of the sound of the words themselves as by the visual appearance of the snow changing into hail. As Junkins revisits this early, maybe even first kiss, his awakening into the mystery of human attraction, he also seems to be awakening into the power of poetic language. Just as he won’t “let her go,” he also isn’t “letting go” of the moment, is holding onto it with the words of the poem, using artful language to pursue something deeply mysterious and powerful.
Toward the end of the poem comes the word play “‘So long,’ ‘So / long,’ in the dark.” They are saying “so long” to each other in the dark, but the way the line breaks and slows us down and the word choice here make it feel like a kind of wondrous lament, “So long in the dark,” suggesting that after this experience he is no longer in the dark he has been in for “so long,” that things have been discovered, a new way of seeing and considering the world emerging, even as he “drags my sled past the high street / lamp at Garfield and Cleveland as the hail burns into sleet”—the high light of the street lamp and the hail that “burns into sleet,” two images of light in the descending darkness, the world now aglow and burning with other meanings. He’s discovered extra dimensions of friendship and fun here, his kiss initiating a new understanding of fun, a new kind of friendship, the innocence of stanza one gone, lost. So while he finds the thrill and celebration of discovering something about himself, about human existence (about poetry), there’s also a sense of regret at the end; that hail “burning into sleet” is tonally jarring, perhaps a harbinger of what this new knowledge may well also bring along with it.
In Don’s flowing, lovely handwriting he has inscribed, “For Dwynwen and Arnie, breasting all our sleds,” and when I read that I will always see him seated at our table in Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1995, 50 years on from the day of the poem, hear the sound of his pen gliding across the paper like the steel rails of a Flexible Flyer. I’ll hear his voice, his remarkable laugh, then I’ll see my own Flexible Flyer with its wooden slats, the “handles” that were supposed to help you turn but never really did, feel the snow gathering on my wool mittens in big, clumping bunches, remember my own first kiss, also in the cold outdoors, that cold somehow making the warmth warmer, the moment more powerful still, everything burning into something else.
I have come into possession of many copies of Don’s wonderful collection of poems, A Journey to the Corrida. Please let me know if you’d like one, provide postage, and I can mail it to you.
You can purchase a copy of one of Don’s last books of poetry, Burning the Leaves, using my affiliate link HERE (I receive a small commission while you also help support independent bookstores).
Find more information about Don, including links to videos of readings HERE.
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Great analysis of this poem. If I were in America I’d say yes please to his poems but I know they’ll add an import duty to it over here that tends to bear no relation to the value of the item. The poem is a perfect reminder on this icy day to notice the details, write from the body, keep it rooted in physicality.