Marcus Cafagña
July 2002

The Broken World

        Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.
                    — Hart Crane, "The Tunnel"

I’m riding home underground,
"Talk-Net" call-in on my transistor —

pressed to my ear another runaway boy
phoning ratchets of angst

while cigarettes and fatigue tick
and catch in his voice with an engine’s

hypnotic whine. The words trip
the car like a golden chain of light

dragged through the heart of this boy
telling the therapist

he’s lost his boyfriend to the night’s
broken circuitry. An Orphic emptiness

seems to inhabit him, deep exhaustive
breath. There’s a distant replica

of myself in his homelessness, a faith
misplaced in leather, even in the flat

admission of rape, how three
older boys forced his body down steps

to a world already broken. If
I hadn’t been fifteen

once myself, suspended in an age
where everything you love disappears,

only these eyes would know me, passing under
Times Square, appearing

and dismantling from the panoply
of head shops, gay bars, dirty bookstores.

No place to get lost from other people —
only out of body travel

— one good vein after another.
Only these subways that start

then stall then crowd through us,
as I walked out on someone

years ago, believing
the quadrants between revolving

doors a safer reflection.
Or this boy’s voice on the radio, rusty

and slick as something
washed from the sea now that he admits

he’s no Aphrodite
reeling from improvisation

and gaudy starboys with glittered
eyelids. Some nights I dream

of such a fall, my arms
outstretched, banking like wings,

feet barely touching the cool
concrete borders that tunnel

below the Hudson. Maybe his hustle
is his voice, a dark song hinged

on crackling sparks. Maybe he does sound
too intelligent for the life

he’s taken on, his voice as beautiful
as the therapist says.

But I doubt if he could leave the city,
the vicious hands

of boys who fidget for a match,
if amid the frantic simultaneity

he will hold the line a minute more,
not because his parents beat him

or their priest wedged fingers
between his legs as if searching

for the smallest bud of lilac
or wisteria, but because his heart

is as vacant as this train, because
the station lights are winking

and the truth is a cruel and unimportant
thing, because the subway lifts

to gather all the ruck
along Columbus Circle

before it crosses the final level
for the dive.

From The Broken World, University of Illinois Press, 1996.