Buckdancer’s Choice: Poems

Them, Crying

Them, Crying In the well-fed cage-sound of diesels, Here, in the cab's boxed wind, He is called to by something beyond His life. In the sun's long haul Of light, each week at this place, He sings to the truck's eight wheels But at night it is worse than useless: The great building shoots and holds Its rays, and he hears, through the engine, Through the killed words of his own song, Them: them crying. Unmarried, unchildlike, Half-bearded and foul-mouthed, he feels His hands lean away to the right And bear the truck spiraling down To the four streets going around And around and around the hospital. He sits, and the voices are louder, An awakening, part-song sound Calling anyone out of the life He thought he led: a sound less than twelve Years old, which wakes to the less-than-nothing Of a bent glass straw in a glass With small sleepless bubbles stuck to it: Which feels a new mouth sewn shut In a small body's back or its side And would free some angelic voice 31 From the black crimped thread, The snipped cat-whiskers of a woundA sound that can find no way To beat the huge, orderly flowers. At one-thirty he is drawn in, Drawn in, drawn in and in, Listening, through dozens of Bakelite floors And walls, brogan-stepping along Through green-tiled nightlighted rooms Where implements bake in glass cases, Through halls full of cloudy test tubes, Up and down self-service elevators That open both sides at once, Through closets of lubricants, Through a black beehive of typed labels, Through intimate theatres Scrubbed down with Lysol and salt, Through a sordid district of pails, Until, on the third floor rear Of the donated Southeast Wing, He comes on a man holding wrongly A doll with feigning-closed eyes, And a fat woman, hat in her lap, Has crashed through a chairback to sleep. Unbelonging, he circles their circle; Then, as though a stitch broke In his stomach, he wheels and goes through The double-frosted warning-marked door. 32 Twelve parents at bay intone In the brain waves that wash around heroes: Come, stripped to your T-shirt sleeves, Your coveralls, blue jeans, or chains, Your helmets or thickening haircuts, Your white coats, your rock-pounding foreheads, For our children lie there beyond us In the still, foreign city of pain Singing backward into the world To those never seen before, Old cool-handed doctors and young ones, Capped girls bearing vessels of glucose, Ginger ward boys, pan handlers, technicians, Thieves, nightwalkers, truckers, and drunkards Who must hear, not listening, them: Them, crying: for they rise only unto Those few who transcend themselves, The superhuman tenderness of strangers. 33 ...