"Space Needle"
for Stephen
and what's 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 or years,
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.
On the tiny street below,
a man is working on the road.
Alone behind his truck,
lit by a magnesium haze, he turns
a little orange wheel,
some apparatus out of sight.
He is the perfect
model of a man, which means
we love his task in ways
that he cannot, and wish
to close the shutter on
the stars, our years, with something
like his gesture of repair.
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Kristin Fogdall's poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Partisan Review, New England Review, and other journals. She lives in Vermont.
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