SEVENTH AVENUE

This is the cripple’s hour on Seventh Avenue
when they emerge, the two o’clock night-walkers,
the cane, the crutch, and the black suit.
Oblique early mirages send the eyes:
night dramatized in puddles, the animal glare
that makes indignity, makes the brute.
Not enough effort in the sky for morning.
No color, pantomime of blackness, landscape
where the third layer black is always phantom
Here comes the fat man, the attractive dog-chested
legless—and the wounded infirm king
with nobody to use him as a saint.

Now they parade in the dark, the cripples’ hour
to the drugstore, the bar, the newspaper-stand,
past kissing shadows on a window-shade to
colors of alcohol, reflectors, light.
Wishing for trial to prove their innocence
with one straight simple look:

the look to set this avenue in its colors—
two o’clock on a black street instead of
wounds, mysteries, fables, kings
in a kingdom of cripples.


I enjoy this authors writing style because her poems seem to tell stories and are easy to connect to real life events. Her stories are interesting and very detailed. The tone of her poems are always easily identified. For this poem she has a depressed feel for it. It includes dark colors and scary people to form this tone for it. It reminds me of gothic students at RHHS this poem fits them perfect. Any time something is easy to connect to it is easily liked as well. Muriel Rukeyser is just an interesting author of poems because she tells stories and I love reading them. They are easy to read and understand. She doesn't use big words or anything that would ever confuse you.