4 March 2008
Have I come to Columbus to read about Spencer Reese in American Poetry Review on his decision to become a priest? Or poems by Elizabeth Spires, her new book due in a short time from Norton: Am I destined in all my thinkings and doings to be eclipsed by those quicker to react, quicker to formulate, more definite of intention—more defined & outward in the activity of their minds?
4 March 5:40 p.m.
Airport as destination: shades of Terminal I suppose.
In a aprinkling of near sleet, I mushed through soggy sod along the airport ramps and highways to sit “someplace else” and eat.
My pen is leaking so my fingers are as blue as in fifth grade when I first took up the cartridge pen—or was it third?
It’s a satisfactory hangout. Plenty of benches for crowds of people waiting. As at a shopping mall (as any U.S. reader knows) people here crisscross purposefully, but here they drag selected possessions in rectangular cases, as though walking dogs they don’t much care about but somehow must have with them. Some hurry, heels beating the terrazzo floor. Others, like me, browse the convenient shops. The final impulse before boarding seems to involve a need to purchase just one more thing. Some make sense: book to read, gum to relieve ear pressure, cereal bar instead of food for the long flight. Then, the souvenirs also make sense. In Columbus, there’s an emphasis on Ohio State memorabilia: lots of red and white on caps and cups, plenty of chocolate buckeyes that represent not only the school but Ohio, the buckeye state. Or one can simply sit or sit and eat.
I’ve equipped myself with American Poetry Review and The Unbearable Lightness of Being but at the moment, I choose to sit facing the security gate, barred like a prison. Its roped off corridors force travelers to zig and zag (having, as I mentioned, already “crisscrossed”) to reach the security agents with the xrays and metal detectors. Nearer to me a white poster commands “ENTER” in giant black, sans serif caps, marking for all the “rats” the entry to the maze.
To the right, one can buy books and magazines at one stall or golf miscellanea at another (presumably many travelers plan to golf when they arrive). To the left, a small food court with Wendy’s, La Famiglia and a sub shop. An array of uncomfortable, pressed metal mesh chairs affords a place to unwrap wraps and jab straws through plastic lids.
Just off-center, behind the “ENTER” sign, an inscrutable sculpture towers above us. The colors and shapes are pure comic book—primary colors outlined in havy black. Yellow, blue, white, red—and black, it thrusts energetically upward, but I can’t determine that it represents anything. jAbstract, comic-influenced design? If anything, it resembles an animated totem pole. A jagged cross-piece suggests the thunderbird and the pole’s unevenly linked segments suggest a totem’s stacked sections—but in motion, as if trying to escape each other.
On a round bench at the sculpture’s base, more travelers and families sprawl.
A woman in a full length, flowered raincoat, who looks very much like a shower curtain with arms, kisses her mustached husband goodbye—just a sweet smooch on the lips. She wipes a tear and watches him negotiate the cattle runs, his brown brimmed hat skimming like a pac-man icon above the ropes—across, back, across. Then, through the bars and toward the gate.
The flowered woman now pulls out a phone and makes a call—not completely forlorn after all. Meanwhile, a black family—man bearing toddler—enters the maze and then a young man with a woman his age in a wheelchair.
The woman in the flowered coat still gazes after her man. She is quite plump, so the coat swells around her like a mylar birthday balloon. she carries a plastic bag from Big and Atall.
As two janitorial workers pass, I decide it’s time to eat. A feat: I must gather too many wraps and bags and go to wash. As I cart my own necessities down the mall, the woman in the flowered coat heads out as well.
(It occurs to me this morning—now almost April—that the prison metaphor—the barred gates, the scrutiny is bizarre in the sense that this prison opens on both sides. Our careful scrutiny at this one station looks, from that viewpoint, almost pathetically innocent and optimistic. But perhaps other bars protect the passengers from the food-cart vendors, the crew and their encounters, the baggage handlers and the vast network of concrete runways that stretch in all directions toward low fences.)
