Swiss Dispatches, Part 3

[lnhammer]

Sunday, 23 November 2008

It's been three weeks and more since we returned,
    And long past time I finished this report --
And by your patience certainly you've earned
    A splended resolution, of the sort
    That doesn't make you think I wrote too short.
Switzerland is majestic, even grand;
It wouldn't do to end up sounding bland.

It's Sunday in a Tucson coffee shop;
    I sit amid some mid-terms being graded,
Staring north at our craggy mountain tops.
    The peaks look dusty, air seems somewhat faded,
    And overall the desert rocks feel jaded.
Have real Alps wrecked me for another range?
Of course not -- but they made my vision change.

The Catalinas may look dusty, true --
    But dust is how we decorate down here:
Our landscape always paints a desert hue.
    Sonoran pallets may not be as clear
    As those the Swiss naturally engineer,
But if they were, adobe wouldn't fit --
And so to local architecture I submit.

And thus our journeys mark us for the going,
    Reframing what we see when we come back.
But here, my message misled the foregoing --
    I'd meant to start this on another tack
    And talk about the objects in my pack.
I'll start again: an afternoon cafe
And I have souveniers to share today.

Spread out before me on the table's
    A spray of pamphlets: museum guides,
City and hiking maps, and train timetables --
    The usual detritus touristing provides.
    More than pictures, my memory resides
In words -- and stunning photos merely please.
We take a camera; what I keep is these.

That's not to say I don't buy postcards too --
    A stack of them is sitting to my left --
And other knick-knacks I will soon review,
    But I find telling phrases fill the cleft
    Between the present mind and time's theft
Of memory the best -- and thus this verse --
A loss that, over forty, is getting worse.

I'd thought to pick from these a couple that
    Embody my fragments of experience:
Perhaps the cog-rail guide to Schynige Platte,
    That plateau where air's clarity's immense,
    Or flyer from the dark cathedral whence
We sat through mid-day service -- but allow,
Instead, just one -- not memory, but now:

This water bottle by my coffee cup.
    I bought it in a local grocery store,
And all throughout our trip I filled it up
    At sinks and water fountains, as my hoard
    Carried on trails, through cities, by (one) lake shore --
A typical desert survival strategy,
Which I still practice here at home, you see:

I used a part of here in Switzerland,
    And brought a bit of Switzerland back here.
As insights, not the world, but understand,
    It's just a symbol of the larger sphere.
    With this, then, I'll no longer bend your ear,
But sip my coffee, and watch the mountain light
Slant westward till the desert slips to night.


Final part. Again, written as described, except we actually left the cafe a couple hours before sunset, and I made revisions over the next few days. The mid-stream decision to focus on just one object was, unlike most of my digressions (including the earlier one), not a poetic pose but complete truth. I'm still fond of the symbol, for all the poem's other flaws. Of which, let it be said first and foremost that "whence" makes me wince, and I tried rewriting the stanza several times but never figured out how to fix it. I am only so much of a poet.

---L.