Thecollagist.com
This cement-skied morning in Hell’s
Kitchen, which sounds like we’d be roasting
on our feet, but ice rings tailpipes in the street
as the engine of a dingy van strains,
chokes and sputters like a felled
wildebeest or drunk with whooping cough.
It’s an old white Ford with scraped-off
lettering, that once was maybe driven
by a carpet guy or extermination crew.
A van churned out by workers in a factory
in Detroit, the kind I used to pass on 94
back home, snaking between smokestacks,
everything the color of rust.
The van’s still wheezing in the gutter
while a black town car gleams by
and I watch and wish the thing
would start, not only for the driver,
now awfully late to somewhere,
but the once-sleek engine now agasp
in dead cold, and the guys from that factory,
long laid off and dozing in front of talk shows,
braving another round of want ads,
or taking drive-thru orders and whatever work
that comes. And for Detroit, its heart of steel
and rubble, the unglamorous, needful grit that set
the world in motion and gave us songs to sing.
I’m rooting for them all, for that gray
belch and rumble to finally take this time,
as the starter fires and turns over,
over and over again.