A Poem by Erin O’Luanaigh

Andermatt

The hamlet grew up the wall of the valley
like a tubercule. I kept dreaming of suffocation.
By day, the streets had the uncanny vacancy
of a model train village. Every fifteen minutes
a Protestant and a Catholic church tolled
their Kappel War of mutual headaches.
Shopkeepers had no patience with me.
The river, indifferent, reflected nothing.
I secretly hoped for some magic to happen
but hedged against it, sitting in my hotel,
reading Mann, yawning. I watched a film
with Isabelle Huppert, a bad one, in which
she plays a professor with some problem—
a nebulous flaw like remoteness or frigidity.
She takes her wisp of a body to a chalet
to smoke weed and talk garbage philosophy
with a hot young thing she doesn’t even kiss...
Next morning, the usual caravans circled
the ski lifts, let off tourists in search of
altitude, fortitude, après ski, while the peaks,
snow-capped as 8-balls, kept their distance,
went on with the sturdy work of aspiration.
Huppert sobers up, departs for Paris, thinks
to herself, Why not? or else, Who cares?
I stayed behind, still waiting for the answer.

Erin O’Luanaigh’s poems appear or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, AGNI, The Southern Review, 32 Poems, Subtropics, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Utah and co-hosts the film and literature podcast, (sub)Text.