A man in the black twill and gold braid of a pilot
and a woman with the virginal alertness
flight attendants had in the heyday
of stewardesses go running past
as if they have hopped off one plane
and are running to hop on another.
They look to me absolutely like lovers;
in the verve and fleetness of their sprint
you can see them running toward each other
inside themselves. The man pulls a luggage
cart with one suitcase bungeed on top of another,
and the woman ... my God, she holds her
high heels in her hand and runs on silk!
I see us, as if preserved in the amber
of forty-year-old Tennessee sour-mash whiskey
poured over cherishing ice, put down
our glasses, sidestep through groups
and pairs gruffing and tinkling
to each other, go out the door,
hoof and click down two flights of stairs.
Maybe he wonders what goes on with his wife
and that unattached young man he left
her laughing with—and finds them not
where he left them, not in the kitchen,
not anywhere, and goes out to the hall and
hears laughter jangling in the stairwell
cut off by the bang of the outside door. In the street
she pulls off her shoes and runs on stocking feet
—laughing and crying taxiii! taxiii!
as if we were ecstatic worshipers springing
down a beach in Bora-Bora—toward a cab
suffusing its back end in red brake light.
As I push her in, a voice behind us calls
bop! bop! like a stun gun, or a pet name.
Out the taxi's rear window I glimpse him,
stopped dead, one foot on the sidewalk,
one in the gutter, a hand on his heart. Go! go!
we cry to the driver. After we come together,
to our surprise, for we are strangers,
my telephone also starts making a lot
of anxious, warbling, weeping-like noises.
I put it on the floor, with a pillow on it,
and we lie back and listen with satisfaction
to the rings as if they were dumdum bullets,
meant for us, spending their force in feathers.
A heavy man trotting by knocks my leg with his bag
but doesn't seem to notice and trots on.
Could he be running after those two high-flyers
who have run out of sight? Will I find him, up ahead,
stopped at a closed departure gate, like that man
that night forty years ago, as if turned to wood
and put out by his murderers to sell cigars?