The noun-cum-verb “butanes” is an echo of the earlier “strafed” because of its association with industrial or military fire. Hendrix, who was known to destroy or ignite his instruments, and whose style of music was itself “sizzling” is connected to Caravaggio,^[27] who was infamous for his swaggering, deliberately fighting, brawling, and finally murder of a young man. The “sacrifice” refers not only to Caravaggio, but to Hendrix as well, and to the criminals of Newark, whose criminality must be tempered with other acts of creation and art.

Something melds with “someone,” and her body (“thigh, mouth, breast, small of back, and hollow of the throat”) is an allusion to the sacrifices of antiquity as well as those in contemporary Newark of the poem. Hull is passing judgment here not on the lovers inside the “hotbox apartments,” but the situations outside, and larger than themselves, which turn love and sex into criminality. Another voice enters and interrupts the couple as it asks “don’t you understand this pressure”? To whom is the question addressed?

It is addressed to the reader, and to the “reader” of Newark’s riot, the historian or layperson who might interpret its causes and meanings. Note the preposition: the pressure is “of” the apartments rather than “from” them. The authority of the speaker again enters: she tells the reader that besides interpreting the causes of the riot in Newark, “there’s no forgetting the riot within.”^[28] The statement again connects its two constituencies, like the iron mesh of the bridge, of the personal and the public riots:

The unusual verb “rivering,” unique to this poem, is a metaphorical leap from a woman’s red fingernails to the “districts” (27, 28, 29) of Newark that are burning. The voice announces another interrogative:

The question is one of desperation. There are no responses for the inhabitants in the moment besides clinging to the lullaby (the poem itself?). Another of the “many voices,” a prayer, seeks an outside authority — broader than the authorial device above — to bend its “dark visage” over the “acetylene skyline”:

The flammable gas, a symbol of manufacturing, provides an expressionist palette for the colors of the city, but is a violent image. Berman describes the years it took the city to learn how to defend against “the next great collective catastrophe: fires… For years, midnight fires ate up not only buildings, but whole blocks, often block after block.”^[30] The statues in the poem are limed, worn with wear. The stanza moves carefully from the pastoral of the park guarded by a Cerberus, who prevents people from crossing the River Styx in Hades, to a black schoolgirl being assaulted by the police. The poem does not shy away from the political indictment it makes. Here, Mumford is again useful to provide an historical context for “the escalating protest against police brutality fostered what might be called the nationalization of the black public sphere, leading directly to rioting.”^[31] The battles between minority communities and the police over police brutality in the 1960s did, in fact, yield gradual reforms over the next thirty years.^[32]