Poem for Wedneday and View Above Seattle

Space Needle 

By Kristin Fogdall 

for Stephen 

If each foot took us back a year, the dark below would be immaculate, like a hole

in space, instead of stars,

or a jar of colored glass

someone shook

and scattered in a dream.

But from this height,

our childhood town

spreads out, a silver galaxy,

and tourists peer

into the giant metal scopes.

I scan the towers, walls

of windows, one small pane:

sofa, tiny people

face to face—a man

and woman talking,

as they may do every day,

or perhaps this is

the last time, or their first.         

The lamp she crosses to

dims the room a darker gold.

It’s like watching movies

on the wall at home

where we cavort across

some stretch of sand:

I want to step inside the frame

and take my own hands,

and look into my eyes,

and see what’s true

and what’s idealized.

What should we try to be?

If we looked down

through time instead of sky,

would we see ourselves

behind another pane—

our faces gazing back

through days or years,

until we recognized that room,

the lives we’ve lived in all along?

The wind is off the Sound,

and makes no sound

except a ruffle

at the rail edge.

On the tiny street below,

a man is working on the road.

Alone behind his truck,

lit by a magnesium haze, he turns

a little orange wheel,

some apparatus out of sight.

He is the perfect

model of a man, which means

we love his task in ways

that he cannot, and wish

to close the shutter on

the stars, our years, with something

like his gesture of repair.

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It was over 90 degrees again on Wednesday and I was still woozy from whatever knocked me out the day before, so I slept late, talked to the 2/3 of my high school friends who weren't in town for the previous several days, ate very little, and watched the first half of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness with Kristen. I didn't feel up to walking to the beach, but we did walk on the dock in the heat. 

I watched most of the Orioles game with Kate and put on The Acolyte with Cheryl when the baseball went into a rain delay (still not sure where that series is headed, and it only has one more episode). Now we're watching IF, which is a sweeter movie on the same theme as The Imaginary with several excellent actors who made the material better. Some photos from the top of the Space Needle: