Orrin Schwab's "The Bronx" opens with a word the rest of the poem slowly takes apart: "romance." A couple stroll arm in arm down an avenue, but they are flanked by "the projects," "stark boxes where they / lived." The line break leaves "lived" alone on its line, as if living were an afterthought. The phrase "the Caribbean exchanged for / the gray fearful streets" suggests that these two have come to New York from somewhere warmer, and the poem sums up that loss of color in a single trade.
The story that follows is simple. The husband drives, and the airports, hotels and "medallion" suggest a taxi. He works "like a demon," sleeps little, and comes home only to fall "into her on the / couch." That verb is revealing. Tenderness ("touching her soul with / his arms and his lips") is squeezed into a few lines, and then he leaves her "pregnant and tired" and goes "back on the highway / back to the city." The repeated "back" makes the marriage feel like a short pause in a loop. The city is a machine that feeds on him, and the poem imagines the roads themselves as violent, pouring "through the granite / of the native soil." His own car becomes one of "a million / cars and trucks to feed the city," so the man is almost swallowed by the traffic.
Schwab's most unsettling choice comes in the third stanza, where the husband "ranged" around the island, "circling" and "rounding Wall Street." The language is a predator's, or a hunting bird's, and it prepares the line about "the streets full / of women that filled him." The echo of "full" and "filled" is neat and a little bitter. He is filled by strangers while the wife at home is left "pregnant and tired." Even so, the poem does not judge him. He "returned to her / always," and the narrator reports his infidelity in the same flat voice as his work hours.
Formally, the poem has no rhyme and no regular rhythm, only five stanzas of uneven length. The tone is that of a plain report, which suits a life that is all logistics. Enjambment often breaks lines on small connecting words ("that / poured," "his / son and his daughter"), so the sentences tumble forward without rest, like the traffic they describe. The fourth stanza is the most telling. The family's home overlooks "the commuter trains / and the racing traffic" and a road that leads to "the fireplaces in the suburbs." They live above other people's escape routes and in sight of a comfort they cannot reach. The detail also foreshadows the ending, since the family's view is a view of people leaving.
The husband's goal is to "cover his medallion / that he wanted free and clear." "Free and clear" is financial language for owning something outright, but in the last stanza it takes on a darker second meaning. The man who worked "like the devil" for freedom finally gets it in a different form. On a night "parked on the West Side / in the dark breezy drive / over the Hudson," he buys a ticket "that / carried him over the horizon / and out of sight." The poem never says where he goes or why. The ticket is vague, the horizon is vast, and yet the closing image places him "on the other side of the river," a place a driver could reach in minutes. The gap between the grand word "horizon" and the small, ordinary river is the poem's quiet cruelty. He may be very far away, or only just out of reach, and his children cannot tell which.
That uncertainty is the poem's last move, and it shifts into the future tense: the children "will wonder / when they are older / if they can see his face." The story starts in the past and ends in the lives of people who are not yet adults. This makes the poem more than a portrait of one man's betrayal. It becomes a small, unsentimental study of how immigrant ambition can consume the household it was meant to build, and of the questions a child is left to ask afterward. Schwab never raises his voice, and that restraint gives the final image its force.