TALKING IN THE DARK
Wesley McNair


THE CABBIE
Up front in the dark he is nothing
but a back and the back
of a head, but then he brings
the sights of the city at night
to my window, filling the cab
with his jokes, so by the time
he takes the photograph
of his girlfriend down from its place
on the visor above him, flicking
on the dome light, I'm all
smiles too. She's the one
who keeps me in the cab every night,
especially with the marriage
coming up, he says, smiling back
in the rearview mirror with part
of his face. But now I'm not sure
the woman in the photo, which looks
shiny and has scissored edges,
is his girlfriend at all,
and leaning forward to hand it
back to him, I notice how fat
he is, his stomach pressed up
against the steering wheel,
understanding at last, the light
off again, this is his world:
two soft chairs on moaning tires,
and him, and me, the visitor
who sits with him, laughing as others
have laughed, and talking,
and watching the city shine around us
as he drives through the dark.
________________

THE WEIGHT

Of course, the ones
who came to his office
might have been turned away
by the salesman's stomach,
so heavy as he bent
to the drawer for his brochure,
he had to lean on the cabinet
with one small arm.
But when he stood up
and they saw how he had pushed
the stomach deep int his pants,
cinching the buckle high above it
as if to say, Here I am
above the belt, a normal man,
they were moved by his effort
to resemble them. The truth is,
sitting down at the table,
where the stomach disappeared,
he was like them, except
for his sorrow, which at first
they could not lift away.
Yet choosing the things they most
wanted from his brochure,
they soon brought a smile
to his face. Soon, at the door,
they were shaking his hand
like old friends, just before
they returned to their old hunger,
the anticipation of happiness
they carried like a weight.


SPEAKING OF TIME
"Give it time," we say knowingly, as if time
were the preferred brand of motor oil
or a vitamin drink that makes the children grow
up right, though considering how time
can sometimes deal us a car that blows its engine
no matter what oil we use, or a vitamin-fed child
who grows into a ghoul, we haven't said enough. Time's
not ours to give, for one things nor is it, as in "It
will happen in its own time," always good.
Taking the aging bank president, for instance,
who in just five years has become the meek one
of the two, sitting beside his wife in church
as though she were his mother, and whispering
all through the service to nobody, not even
himself. Time, of course, couldn't care less,
which is why, seeing him or the lady with the cane
and pills who spends the whole day drinking nothing
so she won't have to get up and pee, we say, "If I
ever get like that, take me out and shoot me,"
our way of holding firm against the fact
that our own days are limited and Time
has all the time in the world. There are so many
ways to resist our uncertain, short futures,
like stopping off in a favorite decade,
as the late-60s couple has done, she
with the long dress, he with the whitening
ponytail. Or, if we want to play for keeps,
we could leave this time-cursed world by going
into the arms of Christ and never coming out,
or vanishing forever into work like the happy
bureaucrat spanking his hands after each task completed
"in a timely manner." But since Time will go on
dusting our hair, and creasing our hands
whatever we may do with them, perhaps
the best way is to put aside our fear of change
and death (fear being the only death we'll ever know
in life) and forget the wishful thought
that time makes good things happen to us,
thinking instead of time as the one medium we have
to make ourselves happen. Not through some step-
by-step program that helps us free the inner child
or get irresistible breasts in just seven days,
but slower and less organized, like the process
of sorrow that might begin in the heart
of the bureaucrat at the height of his pleasure
in finishing his job, or the unexpected flicker
of relief the bank president's wife,
meek all her life, might start to feel
as she stands up beside her spent husband in church
to sing. The hymn's words are about living forever
out of Time, though suddenly all she can think about
is living in it, as she has never quite done. Never mind
the regret and guilt she'll have to endure now,
she can't live without it, any more than the bureaucrat
or you or I can live without whatever pain might come
from recognizing that time has no truer measure
than our own heartbeat. Who says, anyway,
that the span of human life amounts to nothing
but a speck of time? The truth is, it's our speck.

_______________________

THE PUPPY

From down the road, starting up
and stopping once more, the sound
of a puppy on a chain who has not yet
discovered he will spend his life there.
Foolish dog, to forget where he is
and wander until he feels the collar
close fast around his throat, then cry
all over again about the little space
in which he finds himself. Soon,
when there is no grass left in it
and he understands it is all he has,
he will snarl and bark whenever
he senses a threat to it.
Who would believe this small
sorrow could lead to such fury
no one would ever come near him?

______________________