Precipitations | Page 4

the Seashore
Ship Masts
Monochrome
Antique
Echo
Looks at Herself
Spell
Hungry Seasons
Rainy Twilight
The Storm
Nymphs
Winter Dawn
The Wall of Night
Springtime Too Soon
Stars
Night Music
Nocturne of Water
The
Long Moment
Designs I-IV
Argo
Japanese Moon
The Naiad

Floodtide
Mountain Pass in August
Contemporaries
Harmonics
Young Men
Young Girls
House Spirits
At the Meeting House

Christians
Devil's Cradle
Women
Penelope
Poor People's
Dreams
For Wives and Mistresses
Portraits
Portrait of Rich Old Lady
Nigger
The Maiden Mother
A Pious
Woman
A Very Old Rose Jar
The Nixie
Old Ladies' Valhalla

Portraits of Poets I - III
Theodore Dreiser
Pieta
Brazil Through A Mist
The Ranch

Tropical Life
Twenty-four Hours
Rainy Season
Mail on the
Ranch
The Vampire Bat
Conservatism
Little Pigs
The Silly
Ewe
The Snake
The Years
Burning Mountains I - III
Tropical
Winter
Talk on the Ranch
Les Malades des Pays Chauds
Pride of Race
Don Quixote Sojourns in Rio de Janeiro
Convent
Musings
Guitarra
November
The Coming of Christ
The Death of Columbine
Duet
From a Man Dying on a Cross
Lagniappe
Hail Mary!
The
Death of Columbine
Pierrot Laughs
The Transmigration of Caliban

Gundry
Viennese Waltz
Resurrection
Immortality
Autumn Night
Venus' Fly Trap
Suicide
Leaves I -
IV
Allegro
MANHATTAN
THE UNPEOPLED CITY
MIDNIGHT WORSHIP: BROOKLYN BRIDGE
In the rain
Rows of street lamps are saints in bright garments
That
flow long with the bend of knees.
They lift pale heads nimbussed
with golden spikes.
Up the lanes of liquid onyx
Toward the high fire-laden altars
Move
the saints of Manhattan
In endless pilgrimage to death,
Amidst the
asphodel and anemones of dawn.

ASCENSION: AUTUMN DUSK IN CENTRAL PARK
Featureless people glide with dim motion through a quivering
blue silver;
Boats merge with the bronze-gold welters about their
keels. The trees float upward in gray and green flames.
Clouds, swans,
boats, trees, all gliding up a hillside
After some gray old women who
lift their gaunt forms
From falling shrouds of leaves.
Thin fingered twigs clutch darkly at nothing.
Crackling skeletons
shine.
Along the smutted horizon of Fifth Avenue
The hooded
houses watch heavily
With oily gold eyes.
STARTLED FORESTS: HUDSON RIVER
The thin hill pushes against the mist.
Its fading defiance sounds in the
umber and red of autumn leaves. Like a dead arm around a warm throat

Is the sagging embrace of the river
Laid grayly about the shore.
The train passes.
We emerge from a tunnel into a sky of thin blue
morning glories Where yellow lily bells tinkle down.
The paths run
swiftly away under the lamp glow
Like green and blue lizards

Mottled with light.
WINTER STREETS
The stars, escaping,
Evaporate in acrid mists.
The houses, rearing
themselves higher,
Assemble among the clouds.
Night blows
through me.
I am clear with its bitterness.
I tinkle along brick
canyons
Like a crystal leaf.
FEBRUARY SPRINGTIME
The trees hold out pale gilded branches
Stiff and high in the wind.

On the lawns
Patches of gray-lilac snow
Melt in the hollows of the
terraces.
The park is an ocean of fawn-colored plush,
Ridged and

faded.
Sharp and delicate,
My shadow moves after me on the
rumpled grass--
Grass like a pillow worn by a dear head.
Joy!
THE ASSUMPTION OF COLUMBINE
The lights trickle grayly down from the hoary palisades
And drip into
the river.
Leaden reflections flow into the water.
Framed in your
window,
Your little face glows deceptively
In a rigid ecstasy,
As
the wide-winged morning
Folds back the mist.
FROM BROOKLYN
Along the shore
A black net of branches
Tangles the pulpy yellow
lamps.
The shell-colored sky is lustrous with the fading sun.
Across
the river Manhattan floats--
Dim gardens of fire--
And rushing
invisible toward me through the fog,
A hurricane of faces.
SNOW DANCE
Black brooms of trees sweep the sky clean;
Sweep the house fronts,

And leave them bleak in sleep.
High up the empty moon
Spills
her vacuity.
I dance.
My long black shadow
Weaves an invisible pattern of pain.
The snow
Is embroidered with
my happiness.
POTTER'S FIELD
Golden petals, honey sweet,
Crushed beneath fear-hastened feet...
Silver paper lanterns glow and shudder
in flat patterns
On a gray
eternal face
Stained with pain.
LIGHTS AT NIGHT

In the city,
Storms of light
Surge against the clouds,
Pushing up
the darkness.
In the country,
Is the faint pressure of oil lamps,
That sputter,

Smothered with earth--
Extinguished in silence.
MIDNIGHT
The golden snow of the stars
Drifts in mounds of light,
Melts
against the hot sides of the city,
Cool cheek against burning breast,

Cold golden snow,
Falling all night.
CROWDS
SUMMER NIGHT
The bloated moon
Has sickly leaves glistening against her
Like
flies on a fat white face.
The thick-witted drunkard on the park bench
Touches a girl's breast

That throbs with its own ruthless and stupid delight.
The new-born
child crawls in his mother's filth.
Life, the sleep walker,
Lifts
toward the skies
An immense gesture of indecency.
NEW YORK
With huge diaphanous feet,
March the leaden velvet elephants,

Pressing the bodies back into the earth.
SUNSET: BATTERY PARK
From cliffs of houses,
Sunlit windows gaze down upon me
Like
undeniable eyes,
Millions of bronze eyes,
Unassailable,

Obliterating all they see:
The warm contiguous crowd in the street
below
Chills,
Mists,
Drifts past those hungry eyes of Eternity,

Melts seaward and deathward
To the ocean.

CROWDS
The sky along the street a gauzy yellow:
The narrow lights burn tall
in the twilight.
The cool air sags,
Heavy with the thickness of bodies.
I am elated
with bodies.
They have stolen me from myself.
I love the way they
beat me to life,
Pay me for their cruelties.
In the close intimacy I
feel for them
There is the indecency I like.
I belong to them,
To these whom I hate;
And because we can never
know each