The Dream of the Airport

The car hire company bestows upon you the great gift
of abandoning you to the airport overnight. Returned
to the eternal striplights of your early travels,
you wrap your head in the checkered pakama, place
the green Ethiopian Airways eyemask on your face,
and insert the orange earplugs which can’t quite block
the music of The Continuity out – that shuffling of the less
lucky travellers, banging of trays as their diminished
possessions are scanned, ping and pronouncement
of the missing’s names by the same old siren. How many
decades have you been passed through here without
ever leaving home? Try escaping into your recurrent dream:
the one about an airport. Then it’s four. Abandon sleep
to walk directly through the dream of the airport:
its labyrinth as one bright uncomplicating hall.
Your Minotaur passes, long horns carved with lists,
memoranda, minutiae of the dates he fears. His horns
score both walls at once, his hooves click and chip
this marble. Here’s your chance to miss tomorrow
in its role as The Next Episode, to lose the need
for such times to pass, that dumb urgency. Go out
into the night’s cool breezes: be glad the bus
which will return you to your place in the action
has not yet arrived. Look up: there are still no birds,
no stars have been allocated to you. You forget, but
this is the hour at which your father died. The night
is like a charcoal horse pacing in its ash paddock –
it chafes itself away as it walks. Walk back into
the long departure hall and pass among the pissed-off
officials, the ecstatic sleepers. We are already within
Asclepius’s temple: look, at the opposite end
she’s still asleep, the woman you must travel with.
The furniture of your luggage surrounds her like a room
with no walls. She is sleeping in public: we are all
sleeping in public, together, sleeping in public together
forever. Go to her and rewind yourself in the shawl
and pray, your head to her head. The lights keep burning.
Go to her and dream about the airport in the night.

© W N Herbert