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.
