The Kursaal at Interlaken

Here among tables lit with bottled tapers
The violins are tuning for the evening
Against the measured “Faites vos jeux,” the murmur,
Rising and falling, from the gaming rooms.
The waiters skim beneath the ornate rafters
Where lanterns swing like tissue-paper bubbles.
The tables fill, the bottled candles drip,
The gaming wheels spin in the long salon,
And operetta waltzes gild the air
With the capricious lilt of costume music.

You will perhaps make love to me this evening,
Dancing among the circular green tables
Or where the clockwork tinkle of the fountain
Sounds in the garden’s primly pebbled arbors.
Reality is no stronger than a waltz,
A painted lake stippled with boats and swans,
A glass of gold-brown beer, a phrase in German
Or French, or any language but our own.
Reality would call us less than friends,
And therefore more adept at making love.

What is the world, the violins seem to say,
But windows full of bears and music boxes,
Chocolate gnomes and water-color mountains,
And calendars of French and German days—
Sonntag and vendredi, unreal dimensions,
Days where we speak all languages but our own?
So in this evening of a mythical summer
We shall believe all flowers are edelweiss,
All bears hand-carved, all kisses out of time,
Caught in the spinning vertigo of a waltz.

The fringe of foam clings lacelike to your glass,
And now that midnight draws with Swiss perfection
The clock’s two hands into a single gesture,
Shall we pursue this mood into the night,
Play this charade out in the silver street
Where moonlight pours a theme by Berlioz?
If far from breath of ours, indifferent, frozen,
The mountain like a sword against the night
Catches a colder silver, draws our sight,
What is she but a local tour de force?

The air is bright with after-images.
The lanterns and the twinkling glasses dwindle,
The waltzes and the croupiers’ voices crumble,
The evening folds like a kaleidoscope.
Against the splinters of a reeling landscape
This image still pursues us into time:
Jungfrau, the legendary virgin spire,
Consumes the mind with mingled snow and fire.