Glosa: We Had Parked Where Providence Drive Ran Out, At The Edge of a Field
PHOTO: Brian Michael Barbeito
by Alison Armstrong-Webber
It ran uphill to the facility’s entrance...
a pillared gate of Platonic, spectral beauty
that seemed less like a military checkpoint
than a dimension-spanning star bridge.
Title and cabeza from The Atlantic
You had brought along your sharp transistor radio,
its red plastic heat-seeking.
Because this was Day One, I was in charge of note-taking,
in case you fell asleep.
Even without preferences, you were impeccable. Dots and dots, and dashes.
Eyes aflutter, your cardigan fasteners a pearl diver’s temperance in long dark;
the six-minute mark,
when the breath rails
from a stunning lack of bodily reference.
It ran uphill to the facility’s entrance:
my sketched notes show almond shapes, stark emptiness,
lush pinpricks. Aureoles like starfields collapsed in:
We listen to The Green Hand. You adjust the side mirror,
a trickle of moonlight, a wavelet, laps at the wheel wells.
The night air, a door ajar, in my notes—I have made a correction
you asked for and can’t remember
how it was spoken.
It wavers -
Were there palms enjoined, in Djabouti?
A pillared gate of Platonic, spectral beauty,
the rocks under our tires fall silent.
Everything that breathes is slowing down.
Your mother of pearl buttons, alike the radio’s dial—
Every form shone in bathed visage. One, upon a deep.
There are a clutch of breezed-over pages
that correspond. I have left them all-white.
Perhaps we had twirled both windows open. . .
to enfold our arrivals?
An aquatint,
that seemed less like a military checkpoint
than some ectoplasmic roundabout.
In which basic hand gestures
encompassing volumes are reduced, to purely going.
There are boots, disembodied galoshes
appearing to climb a promontory as though
a snow lay thick and even, in filling up behind,
and these go off-page where, lacking words,
I drew myself a clue: soughtless x’s,
homey globe. Less midge
than a dimension-spanning star bridge.