Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway
 
to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,
 
are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue
 
but meant for music?
 
Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?
 
Perhaps both.
 
Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,
 
knows it’s a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they’d pass her in silence:
 
so it’s not only to say she’s
a warm hole. It’s a word
 
in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down
 
in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis–
gusted, and can’t, 
it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors
 
spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly
 
had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding
 
keeps on translating:
‘Life after life after life goes by
 
without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.’