Here’s a beautiful warehouse
vast enough to be all things to all people;
it holds us in its stone wings
spreading over train lines, converging
on our collective dream of the centripetal City.
And here we come, day in, day out,
to mark the passing of our days and ways,
flowing up and over Front Street.
Union station, the causeway spillway
of our mundane choreography
or an origami of voices in the past tense –
here are the lives of those who once passed through
and have long since passed away, or must one day pass on. Hey!
I think I can hear someone singing “Now that you’re gone”
in amongst the news stands, the coffee shops, the ticket counters.
Singing “Now that you’re gone” and
“Every Time We Say Goodbye (I die a little)” like they mean it.
The sound waves bounce a rippling echo
Through the empty drum of this place
That sounds like “the saddest music in the world.”
And maybe, like Elizabeth Smart, you’ll sit down and weep.
Or maybe you don’t even notice,
and just keep getting on and off that train.
Well, I like to burst in here with my eyes and ears wide open
like the recording angel of my own private Toronto, ready for
random samples of the human race and the delicious bathos
of a hamburger combo at Harvey’s in the Great Hall.
Call it a voyeuristic fascination with mortality.
And can I get a salad instead of fries?
For here or to go? …can I say both?
The air in here is the muffled air of loss, of being lost,
thick with whispering and the smell of fast food mixed with history
and the murmur of birds like angels
circling under the arched ceiling.
Union Station stands and declares in a dead language,
“Behold, a faux Roman Bath turned basilica
for travellers and the stories of their lives.”
I love the hollow hugeness of its great vault like a drum
Big enough to hold the pathos and bathos and bedlam
and baggage of every soul (the quick and the dead)
that ever arrived or departed:
who left the city of his birth to go off into the world
with everything he owned in a suitcase with a broken latch,
tied resolutely shut with a bit of a Hitchcockian rope
(or was it really just a belt? or a bungee cord?).
Under these stones, a woman here to meet her mother,
just up for the weekend from Windsor; and
a young woman who was going back to school again
after spending an all-too short Christmas break at home;
and those just commuting from UxbridgeRichmonHill
PickeringMississaugaBramptonGeorgetownetc.
Announcement ricochet off the walls,
ripple into chaos and finally resolve
in a heart-felt “All aboard!”
And here too, tattooed in dust, are the chalk outlines
of my own comings and goings
mingled with the joys, regrets, the apprehensions,
and homesick pangs, and all the hopes of my fellow travellers.
On this January Monday, strangers
trace an intricate briefcase ballet
while in my own mental soundtrack of this place,
the slow movement of Ravel’s piano concerto in G
floats down like the birds that live inside the station in winter
(meanwhile, those birds really do fly around,
regardless of their part in my comparison with Ravel);
birds and Ravel perched on a ledge high over our heads,
descending in the form of a dove on the wings of desire
(can I take the change that you’ll get the reference
to the Wim Wenders fold without making it sledgehammer-clear?).
Looking around, at what must be five hundred
beeline bodies in winter clothing doing their point A
to point B dance to the platforms of their five hundred fates
(I did not think dead had undone so many),
I wonder, does anyone else care? Am I the only one
who listens to the chorus of accumulated moments
humming in the mortar of this hall,
in the high stone walls
holding up the ceiling?
You, with the suitcase and the ticket to Ottawa?
You, just off the train from Edmonton, lost and
swimming upstream in a sea of bodies?
Nearly colliding with those boys with skateboards and loud voices,
testing the acoustics of this high room…
Are we the only ones?
Originally published in White Wall Review 28 (2004)