GR translation: at Test Stand VII the image, at last, you couldn’t leave

[Mike Jing]

V725.1-19, P739.12-31   How did you feel about the old Rocket? Not now that
it’s giving you job security, but back then—do you remember any more what
it was like wheeling them out by hand, a dozen of you that morning, a guard
of honor in the simple encounter of your bodies with its inertia . . . all
your faces drowning in the same selfless look—the moires of personality
softening, softening, each sweep of surf a little more out of focus till
all has become subtle grades of cloud—all hatred, all love, wiped away for
the short distance you had to push it over the winter berm, aging men in
coatskirts flapping below your boottops, breaths in white spouts breaking
turbulent as the waves behind you . . . . Where will you all go? What
empires, what deserts? You caressed its body, brute, freezing through your
gloves, here together without shame or reticence you twelve struggled, in
love, on this Baltic shore—not Peenemünde perhaps, not official Peenemünde
. . . but once, years ago . . . boys in white shirts and dark vests and
caps . . . on some beach, a children’s resort, when we were younger . . .
at Test Stand VII the image, at last, you couldn’t leave—the way the wind
smelled salt and dying, the sound of winter surf, the premonition of rain
you could feel at the back of your neck, stirring in the clipped hairs . .
. . At Test Stand VII, the holy place.

I can't quite parse this sentence:

. . . at Test Stand VII the image, at last, you couldn’t leave—

How should it be read?
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