On a high hill in Amesbury fog rises from lower woods
Like it’s coming to get us with a gauze net made of dew,
So fine that it floats, but that’s not the exact word for it, so
Fine that it’s another form of air, revealing the air otherwise
Invisible around and through us, the fog standing but not in
Fact standing, more like hovering and at the same time just
Inching up the long-gone ski slope, subject of this week’s
Guest-speaker at the Italian eatery at the bottom of the hill,
On the edge of the cozy preserved red-brick downtown,
The event hosted by the Bartlett Museum on Main Street,
Named for Josiah Bartlett, a doctor who was born here,
But is better known for being governor and chief justice in
New Hampshire after signing the Independence Declaration,
Which is why in his hometown there’s a taller-than-life
Bronze statue whose butt-end faces one-way traffic due
To a revised road pattern that made a loop of the flow—
The fog like a lace curtain, a shroud, a weightless mist,
All the clichés in a million mediocre poems launched by fog
Banks, harbor fog, foggy bottoms, Foghat, and Sandburg,
The fog like my sight blurred, losing the long view, an eye
Or two scaled over, straining to see past a skim-milky filter,
The fog draining color from the enduring pines and firs.
For ten dollars anyone can buy a ticket to the ski-hill talk
Coming up Sunday, by which time this morning’s fog
Will have crept up and over our hill and been vaporized
By the guaranteed return of sun rays, if not today, then
For sure tomorrow, as April moves towards May and the
Days of longer, stronger sunlight, the power that pulls
Buds out of winter sticks and green from the smashed
Bland grass on the favored powder-trail of past pale winters.
— Paul Marion, 2019
Atlantic Forests Ski Area (or Locke’s Hill or Amesbury Ski Tows) on Powwow Hill in Amesbury, Mass. (web photo, undated, courtesy of newenglandskihistory.com). The hill is 330 feet high, and for a time drew as many as 1000 people per day with its four tows, lights for night skiing, and well-maintained trails. The area is now the site of a small townhouse condo cluster called Atlantic View, built in 2005. My wife Rosemary and I live here, and this is the view, minus skiers, from our back windows.