Crossing the Alps
Matt Muth
Sion, Sierre, Visp—their syllables
attention I could nearly give, their little plots
of grudging soil and feathered stalks almost
agriculture, all but growing. The conductor
shifted imperceptibly from French
to German, then Italian, til the words
belonged to no one in the valley
of my ears and the rushing of the train
could not be marshalled. To go where
I was going washed between my fingers
underneath the type of blue that bumps
your head—me on a string drawn through
the glacial cleft, and on the mountainsides
trees scraped a living from bare rock
in a heroic kind of self-regard. The palate
of the sky pressed down and pulverized
the limestone to a silky cadence
I could almost hear beneath the tracks,
fine and finer particles of glossy silt
bearing me on. And, nearly there,
the contour of a life I’d nearly want.
Chronic 2001
All of us licking the world
all of us drawing a razor down
its impossible length its skin
a muddy creek bed in our fingers
filled with names the light
went out to give us : all of us
singing What’s the difference between
me and you all of us in our throats
the keepers of a hymnal threaded
in the pleat of dusk and dawn
invincible enough to think
this wasn’t also you : all of us
shattered in a Chrysler throwing spears
of moonlight all of us crooked crowned
in smoke believing that our youth
would make us whole the way you once
believed it could : all of us in
the fields beyond the subdivisions
dangling in the air berserk and burning
as an unhooked star all of us wrapped
in night a kind of love you could accept
because it came from no one : were you
alive to take it in were you one
grave combusting just to show the dark
its seams ripped open show the dark
what moved inside it : and the city lights
were reaching back into a past
we’d just begun and it was our place
to fall away to learn to fall
and none of it belonged to us
Matt Muth is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Pacifica Literary Review. His poems have appeared in Cleaver, Gravel, Heavy Feather Review, Nashville Review, Rattle, and RHINO. He teaches English at a technical college for video game designers in Redmond, WA, lives in Seattle, and is a solid beer league hockey player.