Exemplary

A vagabond, seduced by impish gods
To jaywalk the downtown interstate, is dead.
Addled with booze, he managed against the odds
To hit rush hour, lifting, one woman said,

That slow-down-buddy, wait-a-minute hand
Bums use at traffic lights to ask for change
Before the swerving first car flicked him and
That was it: he spun as though a strange

Notion had struck him, and then a Lexus did,
And he rose with unflappable arms so high
All five lanes braked, but too late to avoid
The sight of the ragged death he had to die.

Full-speed, hemmed-in, helpless to dodge,
The cars oncoming jittered, squealed, and crashed—
Sixteen people injured, the total damage
Astronomical, all for a guy too smashed

To know the way home when he tied one on.
The traffic backed up out to Mockingbird,
An ambulance evoked the eschaton
With dopplered horn, the mayor said a word

About the homeless Dallas still forgot,
And after they broke the dam of cars and rubble
Cops waved the traffic on at last—the spot
Hosed down, the glass swept up—with no more trouble.

No reason now to think about a soul
‘Disastrously off track,’ as a Morning News
Pundit next day put it. What was the toll
On downtown’s image? Email your views.

An AM host who put most people down
Said Dallas was moving, folks, stay in the flow—
Or like that poor fool crossing the mix in town
They’d find themselves with nowhere left to go.

But late that week, soul-deep in Homer’s poem,
Some kid in class beheld Patroklos’ fate,
Struck naked by the god: He’s like that bum
Who tried—you know—to cross the interstate . . .

And Sunday next, a preacher told his flock
How Jesus Christ came down to earth and died,
Yes, stepped from bliss into time’s brutal shock
Like that poor man, still unidentified,

Who stopped the traffic near the Trinity,
Meeting his slayers with his open hands.
Was he God’s sign of fearless charity
For each of them, secure in stocks and bonds?

It was a stretch, no question. But to some
The question mark remained. How could they be
So faithful to their pews and never come
To rise exalted in a simile?

—Glenn Arbery