Robert Hamilton

S. Aurita

A glance out the window is not enough.

Thickening pines break up the shadow

of the train as it rushes past, as the land

breaks upward. We tunnel through branches

wet with lichen. The first vista is a shock, but

nature itself adjusts, decays back into order.

The air thins to nothing as strange filaments

flutter; if you look carefully, here begin the flights

of the yellow-and-white moths that can live

at no lower altitude. Wheels spark and search for

pull against the grade. A few harsh breaths

now, a bit of Cheyne-Stokes puffing against

delicate chill.

Not so for you. In your solar

garden, where we cannot live without sucking

from oxygen bottles, you drift on absolute tissue.

A herd of cattle clangs past, pelts smelling of sweat.

Who are you to them? An annoyance?

A barely-seen yellow spark? A phosphene?

Here is your clarity; it is too much to stand.

They have stopped the train: alas for us,

nothing goes higher than Mürren. Air burns like silica

as I shape my white breath before me.

These are not your trees, not your powder squeaking

under my boot. Nothing I touch is yours.

And from the slopes of this mountain

all recedes, flowing silently down, an avalanche

of expectations. Nothing remains but the cloud

enfolding the summit where a man in an old cloak

is listing all of the laws we will ever have to keep,

and not even he sounds excited about it.

Meanwhile you spiral on cumulus drafts,

bearing away whatever is frail enough to rise.