Looking Down Holes
Mary Winters
The last, best places to hide:
Street corner excavation at night.
A show from a child’s toy box --
Workers Who Keep Our City Working --
manhole open beneath a sunny
yellow canopy lit by flare from a
wind-up generator. You climb down a
tiny red ladder past layers of
cobblestone, wires, earth, then
bedrock; far below, jazz music on a
radio left behind -- you with a
thermos of wine studying
the secret code to the city.
Burned-out house, tip of spit,
Yarmouthport, Cape Cod. Basement
filled with chest-high pines, blasted
beams gone iridescent; old well
comes out in China; abandoned privy
protected still by smell.
Back in the city: muggy pit at
bottom of apartment building’s
elevator shaft. Water-over-pebbles
sound of elevator-lofting chain
coiling and uncoiling ---you crouched
low among four giant springs,
dodging sparks.
If you were smaller: sump pump
shaft in Grandfather’s basement;
burping, bubbling clamholes
washed by tide.
