A Yellow Cab Driver
I wonder how she manages to unstick her body
from the driver’s seat. Sitting in a warm pool,
at least she is encased in sturdy plastic,
and besides, it’s hard to smell anything from the backseat,
especially with the windows rolled down.
Overhead, suspension wires click like a tongue
pressed to the roof of a mouth.
For hundreds of years now, the same star
crushes into pigeon feathers and an endless sunset.
It’s always so beautiful, even in traffic,
when everyone’s haste clogs up the bridges
that call out from Brooklyn to Manhattan
like girls leaning out of the half-open windows of a tenement,
as dusk blows through the clothing line
of their undergarments from which yellow drops fall,
as if to say we’re all alike, the same bladder
and sticky pearls; as if to say, love me anyway.
The gulls gather below a wiry vesper, though daylight
still clings to the horizon like tinsel
to a Christmas tree the day after Christmas. And fly away.
In the morning, I pore over newspaper articles
about the rising suicide rate of NYC yellow cab drivers,
indentured to a medallion owner
who charges exorbitant interest, owns their house,
cab, and the garage beam from which they’re later
found hanging by their youngest sons.
Some descend a stairway into the East River. Last winter
a Harvard professor hung himself after being passed
over by the Nobel committee and in death
became unexpected kin to the fathers of the girls I grew up with.
In the tea leaves at the bottom of our cups
we all read different signs,
though I am pleased that the New York Times
is suddenly so interested. I feel like the shy girl at the school dance
whom the star of the football team
asks to dance. But these wallflowers dreamed of so much less,
a social security card, a mailing address, a union,
and maybe, with a little luck, savings for their kid’s college tuition.
The articles describe only the men,
and their hard, hard deaths.
Then I think of my mother and the nights
she crab-walked home after peeing herself behind the wheel.
She couldn’t find a toilet on the clock.
Male cabbies stand around a McDonald’s parking lot,
shielded by their cars when they unzip their pants.
I wonder how these asymmetries are preserved in death.
Our private humiliations light up when we least expect them to.
In an obituary. By a blinking neon sign.
A full moon that follows like a balloon on a string.
A festive winter display at a Macy’s window.
We sink into a dreamscape against which a curious passerby
can press their nose, until there’s nothing left to see,
and look away before noticing anything out of the ordinary.
On a winter night, sometimes I think I hear
her keys jangle in my front door and can tell that she’s upset.