"Americana" from AMERICANA
(Poem Begun on Thursday, October 14, 1993, at O’Hare Airport, Terminal 3, Around Six O’Clock P.M.)
Gray within and gray without: the dusk is rolling west, a tidal wave of shadow that gently drowns Chicago. Overhead, the gray steel arches of this much-admired architectural essay in public space blend with gray sky and distill a double sense of semi-enclosure, of concealment in a universal open that includes: the airfield with its pomp of taxiing fresh-landed smooth-nosed behemoths; the feeder highway sloping to an underpass not far beyond a gray-ribbed wall of glass; the taillights blazing ruby as autos brake and fume with passion in the evening jam; the silvery Midwestern sky, its height implying an oceanic stretch of grain whose port is this diffuse metropolis. Without, translucent clouds; within, mute hordes of travelling strangers, numinous, their brisk estrangement here a mode of social grace. No two touching as they interweave and dodge in the silent interior dusk beneath the mock cathedral arches, each soul intent, each ticketed, each rapt with a narrow vision, these persons throng my heart with a rustle of love, of joy that I am among them, where night and day, mingling, make a third thing, a betweentimes of ecstatic layover and suspension. Women in gray jackets mocking those of men, above their taut gray skirts, and blacks striding enlivened by the dignity of destination, and children unafraid of being lifted up in aluminum arms; brightly colored pools of candy bars; the men’s room prim beside the equal-access women; briefcases floating in a leather flock; announcements twanging in the transfixed air where cloudy faces merge and part again, a cumulus of ghosts advancing, stern yet innocent of everything but time, advancing through me to their set departures, through walls of gray, as nearby taillights burn more furious in their piecemeal, choked descent. Another fine transparency of film is added to the evening’s shining weight of lovely nothingness, among machines. This poem—in ballpoint, on a torn-off scrap of airline magazine—got lost, along with several boarding passes, ticket stubs, and airline napkins. Now it seeks me out here in New Jersey, on November 5th, a Friday, in a Fairfield Radisson that overlooks an empty parking lot. At dusk, the painted stripes devoid of cars are like unplayed piano keys, a-gleam within the drizzle that is lacquering the Garden State. Beyond: Route 46; an unknown mall; a stream of traffic glowing white in the one direction, red in the other. This poem again, its kiss of ecstasy among waste spaces, airy corridors to somewhere else, where all men long to be. I strain my eyes, as neon starts to tell its buzzing, shoddy tale; across the stream of traffic hangs a weathered sign that spells american way mall. The hotel room— the shapes of luxury in cut-rate textures— offers nothing superfluous, not even a self-important so-called “scratchpad” near the telephone, where travellers might write how strangely thrilled they were to pass this way, the American way, where beauty is left to make it on its own, with no directives from kings or cultural commissars on high. It emerges, it seeps forth, stunning us with its grand erosions of the self; its grit of atomisms and fleet inklings can carve a canyon or function as a clock that wakes to tick one single tick a day. The poem evaporates, a second time is lost, and then a third, in your reading here and now, which turn to there and then as dampness overtakes, quick molecule by molecule, the glowing moment when God’s gray fire flickers on the edge of the field of vision like a worm of flame that struggles to consume a printed page.
Excerpted from Americana by
John Updike
Copyright 2001 by John Updike. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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