The Ghetto and Other Poems | Page 7

like tiny pools.?He shuffles up a darkened street?And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like phosphorus... The moon like a skull,?Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling home the pushcarts.
IX
A sallow dawn is in the sky?As I enter my little green room.?Sadie's light is still burning...?Without, the frail moon?Worn to a silvery tissue,?Throws a faint glamour on the roofs,?And down the shadowy spires?Lights tip-toe out...?Softly as when lovers close street doors.
Out of the Battery?A little wind?Stirs idly--as an arm?Trails over a boat's side in dalliance--?Rippling the smooth dead surface of the heat,?And Hester street,?Like a forlorn woman over-born?By many babies at her teats,?Turns on her trampled bed to meet the day.
LIFE!?Startling, vigorous life,?That squirms under my touch,?And baffles me when I try to examine it,?Or hurls me back without apology.?Leaving my ego ruffled and preening itself.
Life,?Articulate, shrill,?Screaming in provocative assertion,?Or out of the black and clotted gutters,?Piping in silvery thin?Sweet staccato?Of children's laughter,
Or clinging over the pushcarts?Like a litter of tiny bells?Or the jingle of silver coins,?Perpetually changing hands,?Or like the Jordan somberly?Swirling in tumultuous uncharted tides,?Surface-calm.
Electric currents of life,?Throwing off thoughts like sparks,?Glittering, disappearing,?Making unknown circuits,?Or out of spent particles stirring?Feeble contortions in old faiths?Passing before the new.
Long nights argued away?In meeting halls?Back of interminable stairways--?In Roumanian wine-shops?And little Russian tea-rooms...
Feet echoing through deserted streets?In the soft darkness before dawn...?Brows aching, throbbing, burning--?Life leaping in the shaken flesh?Like flame at an asbestos curtain.
Life--?Pent, overflowing?Stoops and fa?ades,?Jostling, pushing, contriving,?Seething as in a great vat...
Bartering, changing, extorting,?Dreaming, debating, aspiring,?Astounding, indestructible?Life of the Ghetto...
Strong flux of life,?Like a bitter wine?Out of the bloody stills of the world...?Out of the Passion eternal.
MANHATTAN LIGHTS
MANHATTAN
Out of the night you burn, Manhattan,?In a vesture of gold--?Span of innumerable arcs,?Flaring and multiplying--?Gold at the uttermost circles fading?Into the tenderest hint of jade,?Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues,?Robing the far-flung offices,?Scintillant-storied, forking flame,?Or soaring to luminous amethyst?Over the steeples aureoled--
Diaphanous gold,?Veiling the Woolworth, argently?Rising slender and stark?Mellifluous-shrill as a vender's cry,?And towers squatting graven and cold?On the velvet bales of the dark,?And the Singer's appraising?Indolent idol's eye,?And night like a purple cloth unrolled--
Nebulous gold?Throwing an ephemeral glory about life's vanishing points,?Wherein you burn...?You of unknown voltage?Whirling on your axis...?Scrawling vermillion signatures?Over the night's velvet hoarding...?Insolent, towering spherical?To apices ever shifting.
BROADWAY
Light!?Innumerable ions of light,?Kindling, irradiating,?All to their foci tending...
Light that jingles like anklet chains?On bevies of little lithe twinkling feet,?Or clingles in myriad vibrations?Like trillions of porcelain?Vases shattering...
Light over the laminae of roofs,?Diffusing in shimmering nebulae?About the night's boundaries,?Or billowing in pearly foam?Submerging the low-lying stars...
Light for the feast prolonged--?Captive light in the goblets quivering...?Sparks evanescent?Struck of meeting looks--?Fringed eyelids leashing?Sheathed and leaping lights...?Infinite bubbles of light?Bursting, reforming...?Silvery filings of light?Incessantly falling...?Scintillant, sided dust of light?Out of the white flares of Broadway--?Like a great spurious diamond?In the night's corsage faceted...
Broadway,?In ambuscades of light,?Drawing the charmed multitudes?With the slow suction of her breath--?Dangling her naked soul?Behind the blinding gold of eunuch lights?That wind about her like a bodyguard.
Or like a huge serpent, iridescent-scaled,?Trailing her coruscating length?Over the night prostrate--?Triumphant poised,?Her hydra heads above the avenues,?Values appraising?And her avid eyes?Glistening with eternal watchfulness...
Broadway--?Out of her towers rampant,?Like an unsubtle courtezan?Reserving nought for some adventurous night.
FLOTSAM
Crass rays streaming from the vestibules;?Cafes glittering like jeweled teeth;?High-flung signs?Blinking yellow phosphorescent eyes;?Girls in black?Circling monotonously?About the orange lights...
Nothing to guess at...?Save the darkness above?Crouching like a great cat.
In the dim-lit square,?Where dishevelled trees?Tustle with the wind--the wind like a scythe?Mowing their last leaves--?Arcs shimmering through a greenish haze--?Pale oval arcs?Like ailing virgins,?Each out of a halo circumscribed,?Pallidly staring...
Figures drift upon the benches?With no more rustle than a dropped leaf settling--?Slovenly figures like untied parcels,?And papers wrapped about their knees?Huddled one to the other,?Cringing to the wind--?The sided wind,?Leaving no breach untried...
So many and all so still...?The fountain slobbering its stone basin?Is louder than They--?Flotsam of the five oceans?Here on this raft of the world.
This old man's head?Has found a woman's shoulder.?The wind juggles with her shawl?That flaps about them like a sail,?And splashes her red faded hair?Over the salt stubble of his chin.?A light foam is on his lips,?As though dreams surged in him?Breaking and ebbing away...?And the bare boughs shuffle above him?And the twigs rattle like dice...
She--diffused like a broken beetle--?Sprawls without grace,?Her face gray as asphalt,?Her jaws sagging as on loosened hinges...?Shadows ply about her mouth--?Nimble shadows out of the jigging tree,?That dances above her its dance of dry bones.
II
A uniformed front,?Paunched;?A glance like a blow,?The swing of an arm,?Verved, vigorous;?Boot-heels clanking?In metallic rhythm;?The blows of a baton,?Quick, staccato...
--There is a rustling along the benches?As of dried leaves raked over...?And the old man lifts a shaking palsied hand,?Tucking the displaced paper about his knees.
Colder...?And a frost under foot,?Acid, corroding,?Eating through worn bootsoles.
Drab forms blur into greenish vapor.?Through boughs like cross-bones,?Pale arcs flare and shiver?Like lilies in a wind.
High