I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble door of a giant
     hotel lobby
and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all night

and that someone else had pushed his cart of cleaning supplies
down the long air-conditioned corridors of the Steinberg Building across
     the street

and emptied all two hundred and forty-three wastebaskets
                stopping now and then to scrape up chewing gum with a
                     special flat-bladed tool
                                             he keeps in his back pocket.

It tempered my enthusiasm for The Collected Letters of Henry James, Volume II
and for Joseph Campbell’s Journey of the Hero,|

Chapter 5, “The Test,” in which he describes how the
“tall and fair-complexioned” knight, Gawain,
                                            makes camp one night beside a cemetery

but cannot sleep for all the voices rising up from below—

Let him stay out there a hundred nights,
                                             with his thin blanket and his cold armor and his 
                                                        useless sword,
until he understands exactly how
the glory of the protagonist is always paid for 
                                        by a lot of minor characters.

In the morning he will wake and gallop back to safety;
he will hear his name embroidered into 
                                                toasts and songs.

But now he knows 
               there is a country he had not accounted for,
                                    and that country has its citizens:
the one armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4 A.M.;

the prisoner sweating in his narrow cell:

And that woman in the nursing home,
                                        who has worked there for a thousand years,

taking away the bedpans,
lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.