The Ghetto and Other Poems | Page 6

dismal house?Screams out his frenzied word...?That night by night--?If a dog yelps?Or a cat yawls?Or a sick child whines,?Or a door screaks on its hinges,?Or a man and woman fight--?Sends his cry above the huddled roofs:?Vorw?rts... Vorw?rts...
VI
In this dingy cafe?The old men sit muffled in woollens.?Everything is faded, shabby, colorless, old...?The chairs, loose-jointed,?Creaking like old bones--?The tables, the waiters, the walls,?Whose mottled plaster?Blends in one tone with the old flesh.
Young life and young thought are alike barred,?And no unheralded noises jolt old nerves,?And old wheezy breaths?Pass around old thoughts, dry as snuff,?And there is no divergence and no friction?Because life is flattened and ground as by many mills.
And it is here the Committee--?Sweet-breathed and smooth of skin?And supple of spine and knee,?With shining unpouched eyes?And the blood, high-powered,?Leaping in flexible arteries--?The insolent, young, enthusiastic, undiscriminating Committee, Who would placard tombstones?And scatter leaflets even in graves,?Comes trampling with sacrilegious feet!
The old men turn stiffly,?Mumbling to each other.?They are gentle and torpid and busy with eating.?But one lifts a face of clayish pallor,?There is a dull fury in his eyes, like little rusty grates. He rises slowly,?Trembling in his many swathings like an awakened mummy,?Ridiculous yet terrible.?--And the Committee flings him a waste glance,?Dropping a leaflet by his plate.
A lone fire flickers in the dusty eyes.?The lips chant inaudibly.?The warped shrunken body straightens like a tree.?And he curses...?With uplifted arms and perished fingers,?Claw-like, clutching...?So centuries ago?The old men cursed Acosta,?When they, prophetic, heard upon their sepulchres?Those feet that may not halt nor turn aside for ancient things.
VII
Here in this room, bare like a barn,?Egos gesture one to the other--?Naked, unformed, unwinged?Egos out of the shell,?Examining, searching, devouring--?Avid alike for the flower or the dung...?(Having no dainty antennae for the touch and withdrawal--?Only the open maw...)
Egos cawing,?Expanding in the mean egg...?Little squat tailors with unkempt faces,?Pale as lard,?Fur-makers, factory-hands, shop-workers,?News-boys with battling eyes?And bodies yet vibrant with the momentum of long runs,?Here and there a woman...
Words, words, words,?Pattering like hail,?Like hail falling without aim...?Egos rampant,?Screaming each other down.?One motions perpetually,?Waving arms like overgrowths.?He has burning eyes and a cough?And a thin voice piping?Like a flute among trombones.
One, red-bearded, rearing?A welter of maimed face bashed in from some old wound,?Garbles Max Stirner.?His words knock each other like little wooden blocks.?No one heeds him,?And a lank boy with hair over his eyes?Pounds upon the table.?--He is chairman.
Egos yet in the primer,?Hearing world-voices?Chanting grand arias...?Majors resonant,?Stunning with sound...?Baffling minors?Half-heard like rain on pools...?Majestic discordances?Greater than harmonies...?--Gleaning out of it all?Passion, bewilderment, pain...
Egos yearning with the world-old want in their eyes--?Hurt hot eyes that do not sleep enough...?Striving with infinite effort,?Frustrate yet ever pursuing?The great white Liberty,?Trailing her dissolving glory over each hard-won barricade-- Only to fade anew...
Egos crying out of unkempt deeps?And waving their dreams like flags--?Multi-colored dreams,?Winged and glorious...
A gas jet throws a stunted flame,?Vaguely illumining the groping faces.?And through the uncurtained window?Falls the waste light of stars,?As cold as wise men's eyes...?Indifferent great stars,?Fortuitously glancing?At the secret meeting in this shut-in room,?Bare as a manger.
VIII
Lights go out?And the stark trunks of the factories?Melt into the drawn darkness,?Sheathing like a seamless garment.
And mothers take home their babies,?Waxen and delicately curled,?Like little potted flowers closed under the stars.
Lights go out?And the young men shut their eyes,?But life turns in them...
Life in the cramped ova?Tearing and rending asunder its living cells...?Wars, arts, discoveries, rebellions, travails, immolations,
cataclysms, hates...?Pent in the shut flesh.?And the young men twist on their beds in languor and dizziness
unsupportable...?Their eyes--heavy and dimmed?With dust of long oblivions in the gray pulp behind--?Staring as through a choked glass.?And they gaze at the moon--throwing off a faint heat--?The moon, blond and burning, creeping to their cots?Softly, as on naked feet...?Lolling on the coverlet... like a woman offering her white body.
Nude glory of the moon!?That leaps like an athlete on the bosoms of the young girls stripped
of their linens;?Stroking their breasts that are smooth and cool as mother-of-pearl Till the nipples tingle and burn as though little lips plucked at them. They shudder and grow faint.?And their ears are filled as with a delirious rhapsody,?That Life, like a drunken player,?Strikes out of their clear white bodies?As out of ivory keys.
Lights go out...?And the great lovers linger in little groups, still passionately debating, Or one may walk in silence, listening only to the still summons of Life-- Life making the great Demand...?Calling its new Christs...?Till tears come, blurring the stars?That grow tender and comforting like the eyes of comrades;?And the moon rolls behind the Battery?Like a word molten out of the mouth of God.
Lights go out...?And colors rush together,?Fusing and floating away...?Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels...?Mauves, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples?And burning spires in aureoles of light?Like shimmering auras.
They are covering up the pushcarts...?Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors--?Little oval mirrors