AIRPORT SUNRISE

When I was a kid, and you could do so, I loved

to wander through the vast, complex city of the airport,

past its chintzy gift shops and stuffy bars,

wafts of blue-tinged smoke and stale beer drifting

out into the clamor of air-conditioned lobbies,

where everything was in motion, the lives

of strangers and their families suddenly so close,

everyone embracing, everyone either waving

goodbye or hello for the first time in years.

Someone was always crying, sometimes a whole

congregation, shuddering as if from the cold.

Someone, you suspected, might never be seen again.

I would have been there with one of my sisters,

visiting from, or returning to, their separate family

in California, a mysterious land of earthquakes,

sun, and ocean, where the only snow they ever saw

came from postcards or their TV screens.

I loved the enormous glass walls at the terminals,

how they scaled upward seemingly without end, drifting

into shadow, the mighty and monstrous planes

gleaming on the tarmac, tiny men waving

each of them this way and that, flares in hand,

signaling in a language no one else could fathom.

I loved to see the sun hovering on the horizon,

throwing out a few tentative ropes of light,

then pulling itself up in earnest, blanketing this

flat and slightly tilted corner of the world; and I, too,

would be waving a solemn goodbye as my sister,

along with the other passengers, slump-shouldered,

moved forward down that accordion-like tunnel,

something small closing behind each of them,

like the shadow of a page being turned, sparks of blue

and yellow from a doorway I could not see.

BLONDE WOMAN ON A LABRETTA, 1965

 

(from a photograph by Joel Meyerwitz)

It's the way she pauses on that sporty blue scooter, poised and seemingly without care, the movement of the street suspended around her, stoplights counting out their seconds, a few men talking, too distant to be heard. It's enough time, at least, to gaze at her freshly-manicured nails, to feel the subtle breeze ruffling her lavender dress, her loosely pinned-up hair, touching one side of her face like a blessing. Years later, John Lennon would be murdered on the sidewalk to her right, a thin and permanent shadow cast across this intersection. But for now, it's enough to ponder where she might be headed on this sunlit afternoon -- a drab office job or soiree uptown -- as the signal sends her forward to the next block, and the next, this afterimage a reminder of a day long past, here and gone at once, its edges softening into a blur.

PARIS, 1911

 

We never made it to Paris, though the framed Steiglitz print of a rain-swept boulevard in that city -- everything gone gray, everything blowing to one side -- which hung for so long in our old apartment, is here with me now. The same thin tree, half-bare and bent beneath the weight of the sky, still reaches upward in defiance; the same street sweeper, shrouded from shoulders to ankles, stoops as though retrieving something dropped to the reflecting water below. The same shadowy figures and buggies in the distance continue to move slowly past. I can almost smell the rain through this curtain of years, can almost hear the whoosh and drumming of it, as if it were approaching us here today. For the moment, this scene rests in the narrow hallway which leads to the bedroom, awaiting the right wall, the right light. You, of course, are not here to ask; and on any wall, in any room, it seems only to get further and further away.