Nicholas Skaldetvind is not your average surfer.

Born and raised in New York, this Italian American holds an M.A. in transnational writing from Stockholm University.

His thesis, “The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac’s Letters from 1947-1956: Repetition, Language, and Narration,” shaped a bit of who he is today.

Words are tools of the mind that help us understand our surroundings and deepen our knowledge of ourselves.

But Skaldetvind also has the explorer DNA of every surfer. “I live in transience,” Nicholas told SurferToday.

So, although his two dear longboards are currently in Dana Point, where he surfs Encinitas, Santa Barbara, and Sayulita, the poet’s truly a soul of the world – never still, never attached.

“I work as a yoga instructor, poetry editor, and academic tutor. I am currently living in Tuscany, Italy, serving as Villa Lena’s yogi-in-residence,” he notes.

Transcendental Meditation and Daily Life Inspiration

Nicholas Skaldetvind’s love of poetry also reflects his fascination for the waves and the magical glide all surfers witness.

The outcome of his work is often the result of a process of inner discovery projected outward.

The Italian American reminds us of a quote taken from the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita (1-2 BCE).

“Curving back upon my own nature, I create again and again,” Krishna told Arjuna.

Nevertheless, even the most trained human spirit faces hurdles.

Pouring all these words onto paper required, Skaldetvind stresses, “investigating poets who deem the self free of external and alien limitations, exploring the ‘I’ that subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, and questioning poetics that take the form of compulsive achievement.”

When asked about the creative process, he feels that it is “derivative in that they’re adaptations from my diary practice – both poetry and critical writings.”

Nicholas loves listening to classical music, practicing transcendental meditation, and “walking around looking up at trees while thinking about what I’m going to eat.”

A life less ordinary, we could add.

And despite being immersed in multiple academic studies and research all over the world, this multilingual, multidimensional individual curated a few poems for his fellow surfers’ delight.

Enjoy gratefully.

Pray for Me Back East

Where night falls before yours. The known
stretching itself further from limitations.
My prayers are also evolving away from answers
back toward the familiar first curtain.

That strange dark of red eye
and daylight so clarifying that I’ve gone, it hurts me.

These times of woe afford no time to woo, pray instead
for the washed-up abalone at Swami’s
and the language pressed into poetry,
into prayer, scripted into apology and thanks we buried
in a small cauldron on our way home by the agua hedionda.

Pray for the surf breaks named after cross-streets, like a birth
at the ocean’s vaginal and radiant core failing against the light.

    For bleeding moons past.
    For the yoginis who saw
the light set southwest, a shadow interrupted from the west, monsoon-full
but no typhoon and wanted for something else
and this land quaked under the sun’s dead end.

For the health food stores of Rancho Santa Fe
and the trails beaten by electric bikes and frightened rabbits
and the nearly dead milling across from the Y.

For the dead who just want to remain dead
and not dance into the speech of men.

    But if they did I imagine
    them saying birds flying, aloe, water reflecting,
    there is only this. There is only flight.

For the little dogs and their sullied muzzles.
For every gas station mural.
For the interstate.
Even for Oceanside’s seed, goddess greens –
our last meal, before the tide of traffic fell.

For our antisocial neighbors.
For our thrifted marble credenza.
For my return to Orpheus Park,
where you’ll be waiting with a new dog
to walk dripping in a Spring mist.

    A Prayer for you, queen of the salt air,
    and my many happy flights
over the ocean’s pounding afterlife, its pull
of gravity that stops me from taking your hand
that led to these hillocks spasming in color behind you.

I ran into the gray February ocean
with your dad’s surfboard and you thought,
    Am I going to have to wait on this rock all morning
    just to get a picture of him –
when I rose from the water
and stepped across it
and waved.

 

I Cannot See the North but Know the Needle Can

You have to begin somewhere.

Here is the hardest trick question on the geography quiz:
how do you carry yourself from plain to mountain
to desert to ocean
without leaving anything behind?

Think: time everything to currents of lapse,
    of gathering twirl.
Clouds foregather closely
as dervishes after whirling.
(Don’t ask for a meaning only expecting one).

How finished the pattern
of each unfolding moment affixes me:
    if water is to boy
        what boy is to bird
then swim in the air, the fable might go.

I turn to walk the needle home
    crazing the mind’s compass to imagine.
Listening to it has the feeling of being home.

Spring is on the other side of the sky –

    line becoming painful to breathe because
    it makes me taste the winter more.

A bruised psalm of alms giving,
of living words lost in the window
in sounds of last summer swimming dimmer.

    Shimmering there,
    a stone wrinkles across acres of water.

Subtler and subtler.

Cut the surface of water
    and sky evaporates.

    Maybe I ought to have tried harder.
    Maybe I could have listened more.
    Lines I strived towards
        but could not achieve.

Could weep here.
Could sleep here.
Caught in the sweep of filthy wind.

Stranded by the shore on the verge of saying:
    Let this stand in for something else,
    the word pure,
    an opening,
        a light I, in my silence, renounced. And twirled.

At the border of light
I pull poems from the rain
and pretend the sky stands in
for my religious belief:
    that we’ve all been borne aloft.

How aware, I wrote down,
of each other are the catastrophes
waiting so patiently to engulf us?

    An email draft expresses the awkward silence
    at our inability to love
    my voice in what you say.

I trade the sapphire ocean
for one thousand moon shards
breaking into flight above a rosy edge of want,
the long pleasing silver ocean shot of sunset spilling out in knots,
the hollow of California’s yester glow.

Memory is the pull of its huge center.

A partition of desire,
a tired antique God
trying to communicate
as if to say: what of it,
as I set out singing stuff
about the nimbus of life direct.

Singing with my earned body
in the same way the winter comes to a stone,
the universe blows through me
yielding as it passes through.

Under a woven sky I hopped the fence,
spindled my body to it as if to say:
    I am rapt with the silence’s voice inherited
    with its constituent ah.

Ever oaks should stand among the broken vowels,
what lingers in the sound:
loss or the found?

    So then in debt light be paid.

Echelon grains of twilight washing over woven ocean
fraying my denim,
catching the chain link’s knuckle-light,
out a red streak of blood disfigures my knee

    in the language of prayer, of capital.

The lack which I am and thinking
    Yes I can
Heaven clamors
twilight-licked and stunned.

A changing of direction.
I’m onto page two of my life.
Who knows what kind of being I’ll become.

When I left,
the wind was wailing against itself
without stopping.

My locks filled with dew,
my head wet with the drops of the night.
I reach for the last star there.

There is some snow
becoming rain too.

This much is true.
Let me bring it to you.

 

Surfing Is a Meeting

between abstract and particular, almost
calligraphic body alignment
the visual part of my body lost
the ability to move
around the same time I started
at dawn I went
to the coast to learn something
of both
the rough and the smooth world’s
long vowels in morning 
to write oceanic words in blue
mispronounced I am on
both sides of the short 
vowels granular and multiple sibilant
shape of the unexpected 
breath I will be the light that feeds
on water in a minute
noise and know
its echo
just below the surface
the sun alight
my hand so twisted
so slammed and then I,
with a fear of failure, fell
into God’s marine layer depth
improvising with space –
to write, to mark time on this earth.

 

Watching

I talk and talk yet I accomplish little.
The lack that which I am.
I keep returning to the part awaiting existence.
The pigeons purr from the palapa rafters as a bedlam
of adoring fans. God bless them for not judging me.

Just as well, I’ve nothing to tell you. I would that
all I love be weak no more.
Fishes breathing and surfacing
leap up at sudden notice, alive and teeming
and going with what takes them.

Threaded somehow each to each.
Sick with wanting and searching too hard.

I want to stay with them and paddle back and stare
fish-strange and still I won’t lie
on this ocean forever

    where pelicans glide before
    each humongous wave

swallowing the last of the light.

But it’s the sight of wings swirling
to a delicate halt around the light
of many disembodied caps
at the height of my sweat-laden shoulder,

    the place you’d lean your mouth into
    breaking through the membrane of gravity
    as if fireflies flew through me at one vanishing point –

that calms me
as if I might, without breathing, fly
alongside their living flesh.

    Lungs heave in comparison
    a wingspan astounded.

My mithraic memories keep strobing
the none-star sky. Sea stars, semen stars,
men and women at war, grass of Hesperus hair.
I conjure her mistress’s name.
A week and a decade.

    To know the letting go,
    the teeming and the desire.

Everyday I wear sunglasses.
I’ve led a horse to water, carried a machete
with purpose.

    You wouldn’t recognize me back home,
    my eyes lost in everything
    as two undeceived tools
    I’ve retired from their life of watching you.

 

The Strange and the Sacred (Sayulita)

I’m collecting things I can’t hold.
Embarrassing things – the bus depot goodbyes,
vomiting in public –

everything to distract me
from the wrinkled lines above my eyes
like the minimalist tattoo girls get to denote the ocean,

or the creased hillside of brown palapas
next to the greener source they came from.

I am happy wearing the same outfit each day.
So much of me is unfinished.

This is how we get to be more ourselves,
step out of each other’s lives
like stray dogs with unusual collars
pulled taut over loneliness,

    become the corona of heart-moths
    commanded by an unmoored flame.

So let me rest,
withering like a single gerbera daisy.
I’ll be a character glimpsed from a slow-moving bus,
the one still spot spinning a knot in time.

I’ll be the small boy throwing the moon in the ditch.
I’ll wear that toy hat over bleached hair
until suddenly my eyes fall
toward the changing light of the setting sun
muscling the sky purple
and my tongue dries without taste.

All the more eager.

 

Waiting

What can I do?
Wish the day over like macular clouds
making the palms waver under the pressure?

I look through a thousand fronds
diffused with sun
above visions of a beach
set loose in the street

    with dull surfboards.

Either she wasn’t at yoga
or the landlord snagged her to complain
about the neighbors, motorcycles, or her little dog,
but rarely about her

    and her current situation,
    which means me.

For this we’re grateful.

Twilight: filaments of pink
and blue tie-dyed cups –

    the bra she’s wearing.

 

As Winter Went on Before the Water

January sun is how
time lauds its children
beneath a sky lace of wires and laundry lines.

Space coughs up a string
plucked from the inside of a piano
vibrating between clavicles
an ocean sound.

A synapse you
named for what it is
and so often overlooked

    in deep water ocularity.

Overhead the ancestral chirring
shows a beauty concealed
by particularity of movement made strange.

A wind section of awe.
Inside me: a desert of strings.
A surprise at first or last words.
To enter the water simply

    and swim away.

That I am what I take for granted
    the sun does not owe me a thing.

The puny light.
I keep eyes pointed
in from the time it takes
to the time it takes.

    Your hand covering mine
    to keep the piano from threshing out.

A vibratile groan, a noun.
Swim, a verb
to see how fast

it escapes the mouth
transformed by
the uncertain music of your voice.

A wave peals itself back
undiluted by sunlight.
From the longing we are

    so full of passing places.

Thinking how this chirring
and its attendant morning

lashes sands
stirring in traps of air
above the shore

    as a rash appears,
        stretches into warm skin surfaces,
        then disappears.

Poetry by Nicholas Skaldetvind | Yogini, Surfer, Writer, and Poet

Words by Luís MP | Founder of SurferToday.com