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The Last Poem I Loved: “Separation” By W. S. Merwin - The Rumpus.net

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I can still visualize the Providence Amtrak Station in painstaking detail. The vividness of this recollection persists despite the fact that I’ve only been inside the building a handful of times. The pseudo-colonial light fixtures, the burnished wooden benches reflecting the lamplight, the suspended MBTA advertisement above the café. Yet those are just lingering details. The layout of the station, its structure, is what comes through with extraordinary clarity. At the center of the terminal is an upward curvature (it is not deep enough to be called a dome), flooded with light. It is invisible from the exterior unless viewing the building from a distance. It is more an architectural hiccup than a feature. This almost-dome coincides with a set of concentric circles formed by the positioning of the benches and the pattern of the tiles. Around the circumference of these circles are equidistant sets of swinging doors, tucked into the four corners of the terminal. I remember not wanting to w

The Last Poem I Loved: "Separation" by W. S. Merwin - The Rumpus Skip to content Poetry The Last Poem I Loved: “Separation” by W. S. Merwin By Tariq Adely • May 13, 2014 I can still visualize the Providence Amtrak Station in painstaking detail. The vividness of this recollection persists despite the fact that I’ve only been inside the building a handful of times. The pseudo-colonial light fixtures, the burnished wooden benches reflecting the lamplight, the suspended MBTA advertisement above the café. Yet those are just lingering details. The layout of the station, its structure, is

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