“The apparition of these faces in the crowd…”
In the Albuquerque airport, I’ve tucked myself into a corner, editing a manuscript and drinking coffee, when suddenly I see the small airport is jammed. I pack up my things. In search of my gate, I ask a man if he’s headed to Chicago. “Houston. We’ve been deplaned from the tarmac, twice, and I’m pretty sure everyone here is about to have a nuclear meltdown.” Edging away, I hear a woman cajole her child to “let daddy figure this out.” The ruddy-faced daddy glares at a monitor.
At the terminal’s far end, I join an elderly couple (retired psychiatrists), a pediatric oncologist, and a mechanic who’s hoping to visit his mother before her open heart surgery. They tell me the news of Biden’s withdrawal.
Our plane has not arrived, and we step to one side of the swirling crowd. The oncologist shares that he’s been a fan of Biden. Such suffering in that family, he says; it changed him. The psychiatrists nod, listening. He tells us that his experimental research department received a flood of funding, but that’s all ceased now, with staff layoffs in anticipation of the election. He plans to retire in a few years and return to Botswana to volunteer. I don’t want to be dismal, he says, but the need for help won’t end.
We spy two pilots, admire their youth — but not too young — and gladly note they disappear through a door towards the tarmac. The loudspeaker voice informs us the pilots will have a short meeting with the cabin crew and then we’ll board. We’re not quite sure what that huddle is about — go team? keep the plane in the air? — and the oncologist muses that airports are one of the few places he’s experienced where strangers keep the social fabric together. No one, he tells us, says anything to strangers on D.C. public transportation.
That does not bode well, I think.
Just before we board, we shake hands and wish each other well. All these matryoshka doll layers in us: I walk down the ramp with the sign maker, who confesses his worries about his mother. Like a kind of magic, then, we’re in the air. Hours later, I land in Burlington, Vermont. Under a crimson full moon, I cross the street. The night sprinklers are watering a swathe of grass. All those dark miles of driving ahead of me. At home, the hydrangeas shine in the moonlight, boughs weighted with blossoms touching the ground.
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
— Ezra Pound
