The Long, White Hall
The sky is too high above today.
It is the end of August.
- By Mark S. Foley
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It makes me feel small to look up…
Getting lost at five years old
at the annual Boat Show in the Armory,
looking at the lights above
like distant stars hung from rafters,
and people floating around
the duck-out-of-water boats.
I watch men and boys catching trout
out of a plastic swimming pool,
but I am a small fish in a big pond
caught unawares.
This agoraphobia collapses into itself,
now fearing fearless, expansive thoughts,
a black star feeding on other light,
the roulette wheel of possibilities
slows and the pressure builds
to place a bet.
I want to go for red;
yet I somehow know that picking that
will make the outcome come out black.
I pick red defiantly,
too often on the wrong side of fifty-fifty.
I spot a friend’s car at the bar.
After playing at the videotable
and after one and a half Bloody Mary’s
he says, “I’m glad the summer is over”.
No one has ever said that to me;
yet I was thinking that same thing so recently.
Still the cold Canadian high saddens me…
as the habitual becomes, finally, instinctive,
as the vine stops growing and the fruit ripens,
my tundral emotions rime up
into frozen, unresolved patterns
of cold, dead beautiful pasts,
like small flowers on treeless plains
caught fruitless by first frost.
I am glad the summer is over.
Someone has pissed the campfire out.
The starlight whispers so faintly
its eons old histories
in this, my dim moment.
Now there is only this cold and distant light;
and I feel so small,
like a young child caught unawares
at the top of the stairs
at the beginning of a long, white hall.