Space Needle - Slate

Photo by Larry Fogdall

Space Needle

                        for Stephen

If each foot took us back a year,

the dark below

would be immaculate,

a hole in space, not stars,

or a jar of colored glass

someone shook,

scattered in a dream.

But from this height,


our childhood town spreads out,

electric maze,

and buzzed tourists peer

through giant metal scopes.

I scan the towers,

wall of windows, windowpane:

sofa, little people,

a man and woman talking,

as they may do every night,

or this could be

the last time, or their first.

The lamp she crosses to

dims the room a deeper gold.

I could be watching movies

on the wall at home,

where we spin across

some vacant lawn—

I want to step inside the frame,

take my own hands, look

into my eyes and find what’s true

or 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 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.

Far down on the street,

a tiny workman

working on the road.

Alone behind his truck, lit up

in magnesium haze, he turns

a little orange wheel,

some apparatus out of sight;

an S-scale model man,

which means we love his task

the way he can’t and wish

to close the shutter

on the stars, our years, with something

like his gesture of repair.

- Published on Slate in a slightly different form, October 3, 2006