On the Sunken Fish Processor, Tenyo Maru

Just as we pray that the Tenyo Maru keeps its hull intact
  as it yaws and rocks
the ocean floor off Cape Flattery, a quarter million barrels
  of crude oil inside—
so too are we warned against breaching the social contract,
  that glass ball rolling
through the creek of human doings. For what might happen if
  the codicils on belching were destroyed?
If sex were permitted in the shopping malls? If people
  were allowed to sing arias
from Don Giovanni, loudly and out of tune, waiting on line
  at Department of Motor Vehicles?
And I remember Dr. Daniel Thompson at the Denver Wildlife
  Research Center,
whose hair was pale as a baby’s, who, after telling me about
  his being born again
and consequent belief in all men being created in the image
  of Christ,
said that I’d better get some new clothes or I’d be fired.
  And furthermore—poor eggshell
heart, poor lungs made of toast—: That I smelled funny.
  At first I didn’t believe him.
But right away I realized that my shirt was stained
  and needed tucking in,
and when I took it off that night I found a greasy half-
  moon under each sleeve.
So at the Goodwill store I bought some clothes that had
  no doubt belonged to dead Republicans,
ladies who shipped their sons to war, a leatherette volume
  of King James in their armpit as they waved.
Since then I have kept a check on what emissions
  steal out of my body,
and I feel the gray alluvium of pity silting up my throat
  whenever hard luck’s ambassadors
crash these gates I’ve erected via this scrubbed husk.
  Which I distinctly remember twice:
once in Chicago, a black woman whose hair stood in the high
  crocheted hat of poverty,
her body resembling a huge plastic doll, the Saucy Walker
  I was given as a child and soon defaced,
her legs bare from the thighs to purple sneakers, even though
  the December cold was breaking records.
She was not afraid to sing in the subway, and I wondered if
  she welcomed those spaces
her song could fill as we riders moved into adjacent cars,
  so redolent was her music.
But she was the kind of woman you’d expect to smell
  poor and crazy.
And I am more at a loss to explain the other, the woman
  who resembled Simone Weil,
her dark hair pulled in a pilgrim bun, her brow furrowed,
  her stick limbs clothed
in a nurse’s tunic and yellowed slacks, marching up
  and down the empty library aisles
where she had laid placards she was filling with capital
  blue letters from Leviticus.
I’m not talking now about the merely odorous, but rankness
  an order of magnitude removed
from the gamy hobos who live beneath the railroad trestle
  and make their living collecting cans.
A stink from the parishes of women, the frank incense
  of all our druid witchery,
the gristle that stuck in Daniel Thompson’s craw when he
  began to hem and haw and cough up
the word hygiene like a dirty hankie. For how many years
  has he made me so ashamed?
August now, sweating like something twirled around a spit,
  I’m thinking of that quarter ton of fish
dead in their hole beneath the ocean, a secret depth charge,
  the sea scrubbing them
and scrubbing, like me so hungry for December and the safety
  of my thick black coat.