The word "taxi" never appears in the body of Michael Waltuch's "Taxis". The title names the thing, and the poem itself offers only a colour, which it promptly turns into a verb: "How you yellow." That small grammatical wrench sets the method. The poem treats a familiar sight as something to be addressed, puzzled over and half-explained, and then watches the explanation slip away.
The opening line announces the ambition: yellow is "a thesis on everyday life." It is a grand, academic claim hung on a colour. The long sentence that follows, running from "Stopping the patient among us" to "its just dimensions," spends ten lines trying to live up to it. It does so by piling up a cast of selves. There is "the smart one / with a degree in spelunking," a wonderfully useless qualification, since the cave explorer's expertise points downward and inward, away from the street. There is someone with "not enough change," someone "reading Tasso," and "the journalist in you," who gets to decide "what / the vehicle should be called." The pronouns drift as well. "Us," "we," "you" and "our" blur together, so we can never be sure whether one person is being addressed or a whole crowd of passengers. The grammar helps the blur. "Not enough change or reading Tasso / you discovered what a tropism was" has no punctuation to settle it, and it can be read either as a list of things lacking or as a quick aside ("or, reading Tasso, you discovered...").
The word "tropism" matters here. In biology it names a living thing's turning toward or away from a stimulus, as a plant turns toward light. The title's own word, "taxis," also has a biological sense, a directed movement in response to a stimulus. Whether or not Waltuch intends the echo, it fits the scene. People lift their hands toward yellow almost without thinking, and the poem treats this reflex as both ordinary and strangely deep.
Words repeat and shift meaning as they go. "Just" appears three times: "just what gives," "its just dimensions," "have just discovered." It slides between "exactly," "recently" and "fair," so that even the proportions of a building start to sound like a question of justice. "Change" does something similar. Early on it is coins, which the passenger lacks, and by the evening it is "the change in our lives." The same word covers a small shortage of money and a large shift in how life looks, and the poem never says which one the speakers have found.
Formally, the poem is free verse in seventeen lines, with no rhyme and no steady metre. The rhythm comes from the syntax. Two clipped opening lines give way to one long, tumbling sentence whose line breaks fall in awkward places ("let / the journalist," "asked / about it"). That keeps us moving without letting us settle, much like a ride through traffic. After the sentence ends, "And in the evening, side by side" brings a slower, calmer tone. The ending is the poem's most careful move. A "hunch" comes that a hand "waved in the weather / would remain aloft, proof any reduction / was in vain." The hand is the poem's real image, an empty, raised, stubborn gesture. "Reduction" looks back to the thesis of line one, and also to the whole project of boiling life down to a definition, a name or a set of dimensions. The raised hand outlasts all of these. The last words, "would go by, on," are chopped by a comma and carry no full stop of certainty, and they leave the taxi, and the meaning, driving past.
That is what gives the poem its interest. It does not tell us what everyday life means. It shows how much clever effort goes into the question, with degrees, journalism and poetry all doing their bit, and how little of it ends up mattering beside an arm in the weather. The poem is funny and a little wistful, and it is honest about its own reach. It begins with a thesis and ends by admitting that a thesis on ordinary life may be the one thing that can't be hailed down.