Poetry in America

Return to Bern

62 return to bern Cobblestones slant to the Aare’s urgent surge where Saint Christopher stands at the ancient gate, shouldering a child over the river, patron of travelers who meet here, where our forbears were scourged in that tower, sentenced to row galleys, or marched to the border and branded with the sign of a bear. They always returned to their children and cows in the mountains, declaring The earth is the Lord’s, until at last they were forced from this stone landing onto boats, some meekly, some boldly demanding whether they sailed away captive or free. A Bernese who swallows a nail will shit a screw, they still say in this place where rain turned my hair into a coarse mane. How do things change yet still retain their own natures? When Saint Christopher planted his staff on the far shore, it rooted and grew into a beautiful tree. The child clinging to his neck weighed so much because He already bore the sins of the world. Here, bears still pace in a stone pit by the river, morning glories drape sandstone arcades with mantles of green and heavenly blue. At night, delicate lightbulbs illuminate silent streetcar lines, and lovers drift past expensive shop windows by a square—can it really be there?— where our last martyr’s head rolled, laughing, into his hat and the sun and water turned red. Yes there, where we spoke 63 of love, the hardest emotion to know, the sort of thing one says only to a stranger. And our faces flickered and shifted under the force of the other’s gaze, the way bodies move in passion or pain. ...