The Power of Traffic
If you want to live in the city,
you have to understand the beauty of heavy traffic.
You have to love the thunketa thunketa of trucks at 4 a.m.
bringing meat and flowers into the markets and stores.
You have to witness the cement mixer
at the intersection of Willoughby and Grant
locked in a confrontation with the garbage truck,
neither guy willing to back down, both of them together
making one compound of a man
who keeps telling himself to shut up.
If you want to live in the city,
you have to see the feeder roads and interstates
from high above, at night, rhinestoned and seething,
spread out like the arms of an enormous squid
or like an alien intelligence, gathering facts,
or like the branching nervous system of a dinosaur,
all tangled up like a mixed metaphor.
You have to understand that traffic has taken the place in our lives
of the wind and the moon;
you have to hear the hum of the parkway as surf,
and the honking of horns in the morning
as a great migration of geese.
You have to lie in your bed at night with the window open
and listen to the music of the traffic;
the lonely howl of the ambulance siren
rushing toward the worst day in somebody’s life,
and then for a moment the silence that follows
like the blank space hung between one heartbeat and the next,
as the cables swing gently in the wind,
and the light changes from green to red to green.
■
If you want to live in the city,
you have to understand the beauty of heavy traffic.
You have to love the thunketa thunketa of trucks at 4 a.m.
bringing meat and flowers into the markets and stores.
You have to witness the cement mixer
at the intersection of Willoughby and Grant
locked in a confrontation with the garbage truck,
neither guy willing to back down, both of them together
making one compound of a man
who keeps telling himself to shut up.
If you want to live in the city,
you have to see the feeder roads and interstates
from high above, at night, rhinestoned and seething,
spread out like the arms of an enormous squid
or like an alien intelligence, gathering facts,
or like the branching nervous system of a dinosaur,
all tangled up like a mixed metaphor.
You have to understand that traffic has taken the place in our lives
of the wind and the moon;
you have to hear the hum of the parkway as surf,
and the honking of horns in the morning
as a great migration of geese.
You have to lie in your bed at night with the window open
and listen to the music of the traffic;
the lonely howl of the ambulance siren
rushing toward the worst day in somebody’s life,
and then for a moment the silence that follows
like the blank space hung between one heartbeat and the next,
as the cables swing gently in the wind,
and the light changes from green to red to green.
■
Hello,
Today’s poem for all my city-dwelling friends appears in Turn Up the Ocean (2022) by Tony Hoagland.
As a reminder, and for those who may have joined the list later in the month, I am celebrating National Poetry Month by sending you one poem a day just for the month of April: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets. My selections skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (my favorite part of the library to wander around).
This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work. For a more official poem-a-day email list, please visit the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month.
I do my best to preserve each poem’s format; however, please note that email clients tend to have minds of their own and may force a word onto the next line if a line is too long for your screen size.
Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!
— Ællen
Today’s poem for all my city-dwelling friends appears in Turn Up the Ocean (2022) by Tony Hoagland.
As a reminder, and for those who may have joined the list later in the month, I am celebrating National Poetry Month by sending you one poem a day just for the month of April: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets. My selections skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (my favorite part of the library to wander around).
This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work. For a more official poem-a-day email list, please visit the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month.
I do my best to preserve each poem’s format; however, please note that email clients tend to have minds of their own and may force a word onto the next line if a line is too long for your screen size.
Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!
— Ællen