Most of the time, when I’m reading poetry, I’m hoping to find something that finds the perfect words to express something that I’m feeling or thinking. It makes my understanding of myself clearer and it makes me feel understood or, at least, understandable.

Sometimes though, the poem that snags my attention gives voice to an experience of the world very alien to my own. If the poem is good enough then, for a moment, I can step out of my head and into someone else’s and find that everything looks different. This happened to me when I read ‘Vacation’ by former Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, Rita Dove.

Here’s the poem:

Vacation

By Rita Dove

I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray vinyl seats linked like
unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall
be summoned to the gate, soon enough
there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers
and perforated stubs—but for now
I can look at these ragtag nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge.
Even the lone executive
who has wandered this far into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees—even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.

It’s been almost five years now since I set foot in an airport. I’d say it’s the thing I miss least about the work I did before I retired. For years, I was in airports every week taking the first flight out and the last flight back to wherever I was working that month. Sometimes I’d have to fly to three different destinations in a week. I got to know airports really well and I grew to hate them.

I resented every moment I had to spend waiting for a plane or waiting for my luggage to follow me off a plane, even more than I resented the time spent in the air trapped in a noisy, vibrating steel tube breathing recycled air. Once I was on a plane I could turn myself into luggage and retreat from the world until we landed. It was much harder to find a way to retreat in an airport. I needed to stay alert in case my gate changed or my flight was called or cancelled. I was always working against the clock and there were always too many people making noise and too many obstacles between me and the plane.

It wasn’t until I read ‘Vacation’ that I realised that my main problem with the airports was that I wasn’t on vacation I wasn’t even working. I was on my way to work. I had no desire to be in the airport at all so irritation was inevitable.

The experience Rita Dove describes is quite different. For her, the hour before takeoff isn’t time wasted in the company of strangers, it’s a welcome hiatus, a chance to step outside of her daily life and open herself to the impressions the people around her are making on her. In that hour, when all they have in common is waiting to move from where they have been to where they will go next, she and the passengers around her have become a clouder of Schrödinger’s cats with multiple probable futures that will only collapse to zero or one when the passengers join the queue for the boarding gate.

I like this idea. Rita Dove turns the waiting itself into a kind of vacation. She offers the possibility of gaining distance not by retreating into myself but by speculating creatively about the people around me.

The next time that I’m in an airport waiting for a plane (which I hope will be no time soon), I’ll recall that poem and try to step into the pocket universe of speculation that Rita Dove seems able to inhabit.