The Gas Station

This is before I'd read Nietzsche.  Before Kant or Kierkegaard, even before Whitman and Yeats.
I don't think there were three words in my head yet.  I knew, perhaps, that I should suffer,
I can remember I almost cried for this or for that, nothing special, nothing to speak of.
Probably I was mad with grief for the loss of my childhood, but I wouldn't have known that.
It's dawn.  A gas station.  Route twenty-two.  I remember exactly: route twenty-two curved,
there was a squat, striped concrete divider they'd put in after a plague of collisions.
The gas staion?  Texaco, Esso - I don't know.  They were just word anyway then, just what their signs said.
I wouldn't have understood the first thing about monopoly or imperialist or oppression.
It's dawn.  It's so late.  Even then, when I was never tired, I'm just holding on.
Slumped on my friend's shoulder, I watch the relentless, wordless misery of the route twenty-two sky
that seems to be filming my face with a grainy oil I keep trying to rub off or in.
Why are we here?  Because one of my friends, in the men's room over there, has blue balls.
He has to jerk off.  I don't know what the means, "blue balls," or why he has to do that -
it must be important to have to stop here after this long night, but I don't ask.
I'm just trying, I think, to keep my head as empty as I can for as long as I can.
One of my other friends is asleep.  He's so ugly, his mouth hanging, slack and wet.
Another - I'll never see this one again - stares from the window as though he were frightened.

Here's what we've done.  We were in Times Square, a pimp found us, corralled us, led us somewhere,
down a dark street, another dark street, up dark stairs, dark hall, dark apartment,
where his whore, his girl or his wife or his mother for all I know, dragged herself from her sleep,
propped herself on an elbow, gazed into the dark hall, and agreed, for two dollars each, to take care of us.
Take care of us.  Some of the words that come through me now seem to stay, to hook in.
My friend in the bathroom is taking so ong.  The filthy sky must be starting to lighten.
It took me a long time, too, with the woman, I mean.  Did I mention that she, the woman, the whore or mother,
was having her time and all she would deign do was to blow us?  Did I say taht?  Deign? Blow?
What a joy, though, the idea was in those days.  Blown!  What a thing to tell the next day.
She only deigned, though, no more.  She was like a machine.  When I lift her back to me now, 
there's nothing there but that dark, curly head, working, a machine, up and down, and now,
Freud, Marx, Fathers, tell me, what am I, doing this, telling this, on her, on myself,
hammering it down, cementing it, sealing it in, but a machine, too?  Why am I doing this?
I still haven't read Augustine.  I don't understand Chomsky that well.  Should I?
My friend at last comes back.  Maybe the right words were there all along.  Complicity.  Wonder.
How pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake.  Grace.  Love.  Take care of us.  Please.



Tar

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our builing,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven
when the roofers we've been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.
Surely we suspect now we're being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.

I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it, 
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,
the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clining like Br'er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.

Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.
However much we didn't want to, however little we would do about it, we'd understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits adn submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief adn distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, cling like starling beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.