Poetry from The Literary Review
After Leaving the Hotel
Edward Byrne
|
. . . we learn how our own history has its exits and its entrances, its waning phase. —Amy Clampitt I Late in a day yet tainted by rain clouds as dark as slate and still swiftly drifting in a distant wind on the horizon, when pools of water runoff from overflowing gutters lay in the shadings at our feet like fading grease stains or even abstract shapes of black paint framed by those same gray pavement blocks one might find anywhere in this city, somewhat numbed by the cold, but unaware of its full effect, we waited outside a subway station across from the hotel for the cabs we had called, and if we ever spoke at all, it was only of that wet weather or the careless way everyone else tried to rush by. Somewhere beneath a sidewalk grating, the muted rumble of a delayed train slowly rolled below traffic headlights on yellow taxis and buses stuttering along the avenue, while street lamps and neon signs above storefronts or a café window also were just greeting the arrival of dusk. II Some clumsy Christmas shoppers stumbled past us, nearly toppling over—each one weighted down by an apparently painful arrangement of large, flat packages underneath others perhaps the size of small birdcages— as if engaged in a strange new dance. I know at that moment I would've wanted to imagine one of the romantic New York City vistas in Woody Allen's films filled with characters whose ordinary lives are all choreographed to Gershwin, guided through black-and-white scenes that seem to be sketched onto the screen as much as any charcoal artwork chosen for a museum wall. I could have envisioned an image of a bridge over the river at nightfall— its span lit by an arc of bright lights shown rising and falling like stars showering down from twinkling tips of holiday sparklers waved overhead by children, its whole suspension doubled on dark, slow-flowing waters below. III But it's plain to see, nothing I might have created in my mind could have changed either the truth we then knew enough to acknowledge or the way faint remains of that dank day have lingered in my memory. Today, as I think of those stray moments that have stayed with me all these years— endured like my father's old clothes, well-worn suits or plaid sports coats and wide-striped ties yet kept hanging in a guest bedroom closet, but belonging only to another era that had ended long ago— I now know our odd absence of pain and the cold we both noticed on that last afternoon, suddenly stunted by an early darkness, followed by the feelings of loss and regret we still appear to share are no more than normal emotional costs a couple might expect after reflection upon leaving the site where their love's come undone. |
