Mer de Glace, In All Its Languages

Is everything a ridge of ice shaped
by ancient pressure? From the gondola’s
steel ribs hang the trembling cables. Above the stone-lined
path, a shuttered chalet. The switchback logic of fear

surrounds the valley floor of awe.
Sometimes it feels like a world arranged only
by ascent and breath, eight hours
in both directions. How about a glacier

that calves in the heat of late September?
A red train threading the fir trees?
Mont Blanc done in morning alpenglow? Anyone
who has traveled here knows the discrepancies

between imagining a mountain
and meeting one. The idea is the postcard
in your pocket and the fact is your legs
cramping on the vertiginous stairs to the gondola.

In between may be the sacred—real tears
when the massif reveals itself—and the absurd—
a bee stinging you on the red train
while the French family laughs softly into their scarves.

Maybe awe is best sprung from fatigue,
like the children of some Alpine god.
One gives us waterfalls spilling from granite throats,
another crampons clacking on the station platform,

another the blond, perfectly coiffed woman
steadying herself in the shaking gondola,
perfume rising like mist. Considerable
wobble in the system, and the wind shrieks

through the metal joints. Swaying in the airborne
box, watching the treetops fall away:
good idea! But also sadness looking at the glacier—
the Mer de Glace shrinking year by year.

The stranded clouds cling to the aiguilles
though the sun calls them upward.
The French boy rock-climbing with his father
refuses to come down, gripping the limestone

as if joined to it. By what
manner is the soul tethered to a place?
Answer: an arm connecting a child
to a mountainside. According to the guides,

there are no accidents. The hikers waiting
for the train—with their heavy packs and rope coils—agree.
You stumble over your own bad French
yet somehow they understand you.

Human wonder: is it the summit
or the climb? They come in bright parkas
and steel the paths so nothing slips
but the meltwater. It is too late to ask Ruskin

what he’d think of the retreating ice.
Sometimes they give you
a view, a silence, and the rest
is your heart’s problem. In one version,

the valley gifts you a morning bus at 5 A.M.,
a frost-bit seat and the first glimpse of the Alps—
silver-backed, wind-sired creatures
older than language. That was before you knew

you would cry when Mont Blanc appeared,
a white cathedral rising beyond judgment.
You did not want to miss
a single waterfall, nor the giant Alpine plants

bending in the wind, thick as lanterns.
So too every decade you grow older
but the mountain, coming to meet you, remains
the master of the story. After the sting from whom

you will never know, you step off the train,
touch a boulder where meltwater sings.