Orrin Schwab gives his driver a task that sounds like a dare: take in an entire city before the day runs out. The title, "In a Day," sets the limit, but the poem quietly breaks it. He drives "from dawn to dusk and through the night," which is already more than a day. The place names (the Verrazano and George Washington bridges, Harlem, Park Avenue, Maspeth, Cypress Hills) show that the city is New York, though the poem never says so. Its central idea is that a place, like a person, can't be possessed by speed or force. The harder he tries to swallow the city, the more it slips away.
The form suits the frenzy. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, no capital letters at the start of lines, and almost no punctuation beyond commas. The first stanza is essentially one long run-on sentence, and its line breaks fall in awkward places: "he drove like a / demon," "having been raised / in the city that spanned over / the water." Reading it, you feel the lurch of a car taking corners. Even the grammar speeds up. Clauses are stacked with commas, and nothing stops to rest.
The key word is "every." It appears in "every road," "every corner / of every borough," "every inch," "every kind," "every place," "every person," "every detail," and finally "everything." The repetition shows his appetite for totality. The verbs belong to conquest: he wants "to take every inch of the town." The simile of neighborhoods that "fell into each other / like a puzzle" suggests that he believes the city is a solvable object, with pieces that will fit once he has seen them all.
The second stanza turns from streets to people. The list "gray-haired, blonde, brown, / bald, beautiful, ugly" begins with hair color and ends in blunt snap judgments, which is how strangers look through a windshield, quickly and without depth. Sound enters too: "languages and dialects surrounded him / intonations welled in him." The verb "welled" echoes the "water" and "brimming" of the previous stanza, so the city seems to rise in him like a tide, more than he can contain.
Then the diction cools. "He could not fathom every detail / having a limited capacity to / envision everything" sounds almost clinical, as if he were stating a fact about himself after failing. The most suggestive moment is the "pain that had driven him." The pun on "driven" is neat, but the poem never says what the pain is. Judging by the imagery, the endless driving is a way of outrunning it, and the wish to possess the city may be a wish to fill an emptier space.
The fourth stanza is one huge sentence of accumulated achievement. He has run through "the Jewish, Italian, black and Hispanic / neighborhoods," crossed the "great Verrazano / three times and the munificent / George Washington twice." The grand adjectives sound like a tourist brochure, and the counting ("three times," "twice") sounds like someone ticking items off a list. The sentence ends with a quiet reversal: he drives "till everyone had seen his car." He set out to see everyone, and now he is the one being seen, a lone car on "potholed streets / and the dirty highways." The city that began as "rich and crowded" shrinks to potholes and dirt.
The ending is a surrender in a literal sense. "He had only / wanted to visit the city so muscled and mysterious" shrinks his ambition from conquest to a simple visit. The city has become a "muscled" body, strong enough to resist him, and "mysterious," which is what remains when knowledge fails. The parenthesis in the last line, "(all at once)," is the only one in the poem, and it holds the whole lesson. What he gives up is not the city but the idea of taking it whole. The poem leaves open that he might drive its streets again, slowly.
Schwab's poem matters because it turns a familiar urge into a small comedy and a small tragedy. Anyone who has tried to master a subject, a place, or a person in one great effort will recognize the driver's greed and his deflation. The poem also suggests that some places and people can only be known a little at a time.