“Tunnel Music”
Mark Doty

Times Square, the shuttle's quick chrome

flies open and the whole car floods with

-- what is it? Infernal industry, the tunnels

under Manhattan broken into hell at last?



Guttural churr and whistle and grind

of the engines that spin the poles?

Enormous racket, ungodly. What it is

is percussion: nine black guys



with nine lovely, previously unimagined

constructions of metal ripped and mauled,

welded and oiled: scoured chemical drums,

torched rims, unnameable disks of chrome.



Artifacts of wreck? The end of industry?

A century's failures reworked, bent,

hammered out, struck till their shimmying

tumbles and ricochets from tile walls:



anything dinged, busted or dumped

can be beaten till it sings.

A kind of ghostly joy in it,

though this music's almost unrecognizable,



so utterly of the coming world it is.