THE GREAT ADVENTURE
The woman hailing a taxi in the rain
who is almost crushed by another taxi
and next by a third taxi
and then at last when she almost flags down a taxi
she is nearly run over again—
I think about this stranger often and feel something like
uncorrupted love for her
and I think about how
the next taxi drenching her and nearly running over her foot veered
and I thought then: that is the way to live,
to be like the last taxi driver
knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet
but stopping anyway
and yes she’s in the back seat puddling away
and she is laughing
and I thought that is the way to live—
to keep trying to catch what speeds past
despite even the street lifting up to insult you
and aren’t you like all those taxis, the way
your heart keeps skidding around?
And let there be someone waiting
anxious to see the taxi driver and
the woman riding,
someone who says convincingly: It’s all right, all of it,
we’re all going to get somewhere.
-Lee Upton Published in Triquarterly July 15 2024
Lee Upton's comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, was launched in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her most recent book of poetry is her seventh collection, The Day Every Day Is, winner of the Saturnalia Books Prize (2023). Another novel, a literary mystery, Wrongful, is due out from Sagging Meniscus in 2025, and a third novel,The Withers, set in a near-future world where organ trafficking threatens families, will appear in 2026 from Regal House Publishing. A sequel to Tabitha, Get Up, is forthcoming in 2026: Tabitha, Stay Up. Her New & Selected Poems will appear in 2027. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Southern Review, and three editions of Best American Poetry.
Lee Upton’s frenetic and enlightening “The Great Adventure” shares its breathlessness with Frank O’Hara’s famous “Poem [Lana Turner] has Collapsed” in which chaos is general over Manhattan as “it started raining and snowing” and “the traffic / was acting exactly like the sky,” and a final clarity leaps from chaos: “Lana Turner we love you get up.” But the woman in Upton’s poem is not a headline, but someone directly observed, caught in the rapids of traffic:
The woman hailing a taxi in the rain
who is almost crushed by another taxi
and next by a third taxi
and then at last when she almost flags down a taxi
she is nearly run over again—
This woman is behaving foolishly and dangerously, we think. She is lucky to be alive.
The poem’s next lines recall an O’Hara title, “Meditations in an Emergency”:
I think about this stranger often and feel something like
uncorrupted love for her
and I think about how
the next taxi drenching her and nearly running over her foot veered
and I thought then: that is the way to live,
to be like the last taxi driver
knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet
but stopping anyway
So much is happening: the “uncorrupted love” that makes us think of all the forms of love that don’t qualify for that description, that demonstrates it’s possible to love a stranger on the strength of ordinary actions; the run-on line that hits us with serial misfortune halted with the small verb “veered,” the astonishing conclusion, “that is the way to live,” which we think applies to the woman but instead to the beneficent driver “knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet / but stopping anyway.” Upton’s phrasing is as direct and practical as the driver’s thoughts must be, but then comes what we have given up on, praise for the woman, “and yes she is in the back seat puddling away /and she is laughing”:
and I thought that is the way to live—
to keep trying to catch what speeds past
despite even the street lifting up to insult you
This sentiment recalls William Blake’s “He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in Eternity’s sunrise”; the multivalent “insult” like W.H. Auden’s “nights of insult,” both injurious and unkind.
Then, in a turn sudden as a careening cab’s, the speaker asks herself “aren’t you like all those taxis, the way / your heart keeps skidding around? Upton has, we find, O’Hara’s skill at bringing life to the inanimate city, joining it to herself and our selves.
A final surprise is the valedictory “Let there be someone,” asking that there be a human destination to bless the confusion and its aftermath and provide a simple, reassuring comment on the human condition:
And let there be someone waiting
anxious to see the taxi driver and
the woman riding,
someone who says convincingly: It’s all right, all of it,
we’re all going to get somewhere.
Upton modestly makes way for another “someone”—a voice that can soothe her, too, with the promise that frustration will give way not to happiness, but something more bland, capacious and possible: getting “somewhere.” At the beginning of Lee Upton’s generous and generative poem, we may patronizingly think the woman lucky to be alive. At its end, we think the same—not in complaint but in mutual affirmation. – Angela Ball
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