An Improvement in Stairs

Through the oculus of the bus terminal at Boston’s South Station, light falls

for a hundred feet. A shock, a god, a pillar of light, like that of the Pantheon

if the Pantheon had a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts, surly young workers

at the Greyhound desk, & an escalator rising to its height—

just like it, that light. A patent for an early escalator called it an improvement

in stairs. An improvement, surely, how I’m standing still & still, somehow,

going up & up & up. My favorite patents are the ones Houdini sought for tricks

never performed: a block of ice he would leave whole, a box within a water-filled box

he would escape from dry. (I should mention: at least one thing in this poem is a lie.)

I can disappear, too: from one place, from another. There’s nothing quite as nice

as leaving, when you’re in the mood. There’s nothing quite as nice as coming back.

Years ago, I stood beneath the Pantheon & thought how beautiful, how sublime,

how like the bus terminal at South Station, if it had a Dunkin’ Donuts.

During the war, Houdini offered to teach soldiers headed to the front

how to escape torpedoed vessels, German handcuffs. As a kid

in Appleton, Wisconsin, he’d dreamed of playing baseball—

the stage of the stadium, the long fly making its escape.

The way there is a place in the game called home

& the goal is to get there

again & again.