Patrick Donnelly
Illgraben Debris Flow
—Canton of Valais, Switzerland
The mountain can’t heal, now.
What sheared off left a slant
too steep
for chamois scat or larch seedling
to catch, everything scoured
bare by rain and rain again,
as if rain were carbolic.
The literature says
torrents with check dams may be
more prone to memory effects. Translation:
any effort to
make things better makes them worse.
These days A.I. surveils the mountain.
Every thunderhead
triggers a klaxon in the valley,
(from Greek,
“I shriek”), a light like a migraine
turns on a pole, and the Rhône braces
against a new dump of cement
nobody ordered.
Here are some
six-ton boulders
lifted
as though they were
eider feather.
In twenty waves,
chased by
a slim stream of milt
through the stony bed.
How long has this been going on,
the therapist asked.
Seven hundred
years: the 14th century
was a hard time for me. Again today
there’s rain on the mountain.
Dramatic, unstable, misunderstood,
oh love,
here I come.
Patrick Donnelly reads “Illgraben Debris Flow”
Patrick Donnelly is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025). About Donnelly, Gregory Orr wrote “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly is Program Director of The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award. More at: patrickdonnellypoetry.com