The taxi driver ferries passengers
in a clunky station wagon
in bright sun and the depths of night.
An old woman needs safe passage
to the supermarket and home.
A prostitute needs a ride
to work on the Stroll downtown.
Pentacostal preachers arrive
in town for their convention.
An old Vet faints coming home
in the lobby of the Jefferson Arms,
and has to be carried
upstairs to his wife.
A young man going to visit
the State Orphanage
where he was raised
goes in to get the money
and skips out on his fare.
Three Chinese men
don't know how to tell the driver
where they want to go:
a hilarious chaos ensues
until one pulls out a matchbook
with an ad on its front cover
for a restaurant across the river.
* * *
Sometimes his "passenger"
is a box of chilled blood
on dry ice, urgently bound
for a patient's veins.
He has no clue where
the next fare will take him.
Sometimes he companions
the white moon all night.
Other nights he goes it alone
through frigid, moonless skies,
as white smoke from
factory chimneys
ascends the city like prayers.
The mystic radio's crackling
can bring a voice from the night
to send him gliding the silent streets
for a rendezvous with some lonely soul.
He's getting to know the city, he feels,
the way he knows his own soul.
Each fare who gets in the cab
is a version of himself,
and an uncanny feeling visits, sometimes,
that he's not just a tiny point on a grid,
but the whole mandala* at once.
* * *
Every afternoon at rush hour,
the bottom falls out of the world:
workers race madly to empty downtown.
The traffic cops blow their whistles
while waving their frantic arms,
but it takes more than red lights and police
to counter the chaos there on the streets.
The hand that directs the traffic
is Providence itself.
He watches the city and the world survive
miraculously, one more day.
And every day
it happens again.
Though after a time
life pushes him
on to other adventures,
a green Checker taxi
will always be cruising
somewhere on the streets
of his heart,
just as there will always be
such ferrymen in the world—
as long as there are cities,
as long as there is night.
___
*mandala: from sanskrit, circle. Any circular design motif.
Mandalas are said to be symbolic of Wholeness.
copyright 2004 by Max Reif