Today in the taxi I got a fare on Main Street and Front Street in DUMBO going to Madison Square Garden. She got in and said, “I’m so late! Today might be the day I get fired!”
We reasoned with the movement of the potholes, the people and things coming from all directions.
The bridge had its iron sounds and brown loneliness, the pikes of waves on the East River, and the solid axe of wind.
I got her there on time and she tipped me $20. “This is for you my friend.”
Kafka interjects that The inner world can only be experienced, not described.
Unlike Kafka, however, Singer does not seem to complain. Although he doesn’t gush with pride in his work, there is nevertheless a constant sense that something momentous is happening to him. “I moved the city around the city,” he writes reflecting on one evening. And, to avoid the tedium, he constantly changes gears. For instance, encountering one exceptionally difficult customer, he contemplates the act of driving as a metaphor for psychological underpinnings of an interpersonal encounter: “After a while driving eight hours a day, the driver and the car become one. It is not unlike being a person—moving forward on a one-way that is irreversible and pre-determined. I instinctively compute the spaces around the car and move faster—mirror in the mirror—then only briefly letting my eyes meet his eyes.” >>>
— Jake Marmer
JAKE MARMER
APRIL 09, 202
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/poems-driving-taxi