Postscript from Ixlia

I think of you in Airports,
how you noticed all the different shoes.
Once you looked at my shoes as strange,
then strange became interesting.
I remember your story of how a French restaurant
served kidneys to your unsuspecting palate.
Tonight I ate octopus and seaweed,
at an airport, in Detroit after a tornado.

Alarms sounded, we rode escalators underground,
a throng in a tunnel waiting.
A stranger told me of a day
in 1974, an F5 storm, winds 132 miles per hour,
hail stones the size of a cue ball,
the town of Ixlia: flattened.

Flights delayed, I sit for hours watching,
Japanese men eat ramen bowls, drink, Kirin beer,
sparrows fly by the fountain and fake trees,
people eat muffins, drink coffee.
In the soap store, I test samples,
lavender, lemon, vanilla, boredom.

After midnight, finally airborne —
above storms along the Great Lakes —
I look down on columns of lightning
connecting clouds to earth,
surrounded by darkness.

I think of you in airports, stiff in your town clothes,
new shoes walking away from the worn
canvas sneakers of summer — into a winter life.
You saw all the shoes, the world expanded,
then contracted again like an accordion
repeating seasons of arrivals,
a chorus of see-you-next-year departures.
Projects planned, set aside, rekindled
in constant, machine-like motion
until the temperature dropped,
the wind picked up and a storm moved in.
The house you built still stands.

I watch ghostly silver planes high above,
picture tiny people aloft,
eating, reading, sleeping,
some search for land, far below.

I looked up Ixlia and found
that on a day of super storms,
a town named Xenia was demolished,
but Ixlia never existed.