"If you pass through here you won't come back."

Riding the Metro to work,
underground through Washington,
something like living a life
on the surface--beginning,
middle, end--although you don't
know where the middle was
until you get to the end,
somewhere near which you come out
into air and light. Monuments
and rivers go by. Planes fly past
overhead. And then you go down
again, into the earth. You notice
that people getting off rarely
have anything to say to people
getting on. And when you
get off, you come up not into some
blue heaven but into a huge building
with endless corridors, stairways
leading to nowhere, doors with
warnings scrawled on paper:

If you pass through here
you won't come back.
No hardware on other side.
Door will lock.

Halvard Johnson



Born in Newburgh, New York, and educated at Ohio Wesleyan University and the University of Chicago, Halvard Johnson has received numerous grants, published in a wide variety of both print and net journals, and is the author of four published collections of poetry: Transparencies and Projections, The Dance of the Red Swan, Eclipse, and Winter Journey, which are archived online at the Contemporary American Poetry Archive.