Switzerland

Everything was possible 

in the mountains of Switzerland.

Or so I thought.

At seventeen I found myself on a train 

leaving Zurich and heading through the Alps 

toward the monastery town of Eisendeln. 

My head shaved, my army-green Smith Corona 

abandoned back at the hotel, my feet worn-out

from wandering a foreign country as a stranger

to everything and everyone.

All I really knew of Switzerland was from

a calendar picture of the Swiss Mountains

that had hung in my mother’s kitchen

where a steeple rose up from a glade

beside a stream. That and having seen

The Sound of Music as a child, I knew

it had been over the Alps that the Von Trapps

had escaped to safety. Also Heidi’s crippled

friend learned to walk again 

because the mountain air and water

were so crystalline it had brought

feeling back to her legs.

In Switzerland, clouds were decidedly more vivid,

the sky able to make as much sense beneath you

as above. Reflection is the key to Switzerland.

Maybe that’s why I had imagined

a sanitarium nestled in a valley

surrounded by fiords where tubercular patients 

could rest in chairs beneath fruit trees 

after taking too much sun,

their sensitivities heightened by the altitude,

their perceptions becoming so in tune with the purpose

of the honey bees drawing sustenance from

the field flowers that it would cause their conditions 

to resolve themselves as readily as ice melts at the touch.

Here, away from the things of man

it was possible to live in a constant state

of astonishment, where miracles

were as common as the re-emergence

of caterpillars unfurling their wings.

Hot air balloons were surely the mode of travel

in Switzerland,

a place without magazines or cigarettes,

junk food, or car accidents, pollution or murders,

or robbery, wars or famine, or homelessness,

a place where no one is poor, starving 

or down on their luck, or ever depressed

because everything is curable

by taking a walk or opening a window.

Switzerland was where you went when

you’d grown tired of the ways of the world,

a place where thoughts found diamond-like clarity.

A place where I, muted by depression and emboldened

by heartache, was to find what I’d been looking for.

However, not before asking myself

if it were possible to run towards something

without running away from something else.

At seventeen I'd come to kill myself in Switzerland;

a place whose natural beauty

could never be more affecting than when

apprehended by a broken heart.

March 29th, 2021