"Austria Bound"
Munich winked in our rear-view mirror
and we rolled south, John and I, for Austria
or bust, two 19 year-old soldiers
with a weekend pass, running behind the Alps' shadows that swept
the autobahn clean before our chugging, bastard Ford,
passed slick and smooth by black BMW's and Porsches
like we were in reverse.
When the hash burned up, we switched to German beer,
cool and pungent on our tongues, spoke
of the Nurnberg whores: muscle-lithe, young
and feisty as fillies on a crisp morning, and bragged
how often and how many we'd fucked
and which had the cutest ass-dimple or blue-fire eyes.
Then we were up into the mountains and cresting Austria.
A white river snaked on our left so I slammed the brakes
and we scrambled out to drink and wade in the liquid ice
that ankle-streamed us into numbed and legless cranes,
and thrummed down the steep hill as if the whole world
depended on a single stream's tumbling love for depths.
Back into our busted Ford, we slung skyward
like a crooked arrow toward the peak's one eye, up and around,
smart-ass dervish cowboys, then out of the car in a race
of half-stoned rubes, arm-punching and fighting our way to the lip
of the world's horizon and there, right down there,
a vast cry of light rose up.
Salzburg lifted
and fell on the breast of the earth.
It was death-quiet and John fell down
to his knees
and I stood up on the air
into a swagger-float above the ground
at the mountain's brow,
and I had no dream in my pocket to help me
recall the words
that this hovering above deep lights called for,
but I saw, oh god, my dreamed, mistress city,
and what I could not speak but knew: a thousand years
of children on the razored cliffs
in their moon-reflected sweat, and all the cowbells of mountained Europe
old and dusty, chiming and pealing to the song
I knew I could teach them to sing.
So I settled to the glomming earth, and we stood in the world
with nothing but air above or beside, though clouds went under
and the brushed hills folded like fans at our feet.
© 2007 Charles Musser
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