David Gruber

The Body Wealthy in Work

How glass watches us, watching us
and the far lights from the city behind
us with our back to it, our Houstons
our hot Atlantas.  Work rising up tall

overhead in the night, with us even
at home, watching as we watch ourselves
in the glass, mark out the slow slough
of skin, marked by sun, by wind burnt

and by the blade, by the stone pitched
hard into skull, by the dresser we fell into
as a kid.  How it stays with us
even so damaged, so abused.  And we

cannot love it, the body, though once
or twice, it has caught the light
just so – so that we looked lean, sleek
in just the way that capital teaches we are

meant to look: though that even a trick
of the glass that watches us, and still
we pack up our body in the morning
slowly liquefying, and take it to work

with a love so hard with anger
it could set all the miles between terrace
and skyscraper ablaze. 
How we give our every day over to it
our monument, bodily.