The Ghetto and Other Poems | Page 6

the Ghetto,
And, one floor down across the
court,
The parrot screaming:
Vorwärts... Vorwärts...
The parrot frowsy-white,
Everlastingly swinging
On its iron bar.
A little old woman,
With a wig of smooth black hair
Gummed
about her shrunken brows,
Comes sometimes on the fire escape.
An
old stooped mother,
The left shoulder low

With that uneven
droopiness that women know
Who have suckled many young...
Yet
I have seen no other than the parrot there.
I watch her mornings as she shakes her rugs
Feebly, with futile reach

And fingers without clutch.
Her thews are slack
And curved the
ruined back
And flesh empurpled like old meat,
Yet each conspires

To feed those guttering fires
With which her eyes are quick.
On Friday nights
Her candles signal
Infinite fine rays
To other

windows,
Coupling other lights,
Linking the tenements
Like an
endless prayer.
She seems less lonely than the bird
That day by day about the 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:
Vorwärts... Vorwärts...
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