The Ghetto and Other Poems | Page 8

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 over Broadway
A far-flung sign
Glitters in indigo darkness

And spurts again rhythmically,
Spraying great drops
Red as a
hemorrhage.
SPRING
A spring wind on the Bowery,
Blowing the fluff of night shelters

Off bedraggled garments,
And agitating the gutters, that eject little
spirals of vapor Like lewd growths.
Bare-legged children stamp in the puddles, splashing each other,
One--with a choir-boy's face
Twits me as I pass...
The word, like a
muddied drop,
Seems to roll over and not out of
The bowed lips,

Yet dewy red
And sweetly immature.
People sniff the air with an upward look--
Even the mite of a girl

Who never plays...
Her mother smiles at her
With eyes like vacant
lots
Rimming vistas of mean streets
And endless washing days...

Yet with sun on the lines
And a drying breeze.
The old candy woman
Shivers in the young wind.
Her eyes--littered
with memories
Like ancient garrets,
Or dusty unaired rooms where
someone died--
Ask nothing of the spring.
But a pale pink dream
Trembles about this young girl's body,

Draping it like a glowing aura.
She gloats in a mirror
Over her gaudy hat,
With its flower God
never thought of...
And the dream, unrestrained,
Floats about the loins of a soldier,

Where it quivers a moment,
Warming to a crimson
Like the scarf of
a toreador...

But the delicate gossamer breaks at his contact
And recoils to her in
strands of shattered rose.
BOWERY AFTERNOON
Drab discoloration
Of faces, façades, pawn-shops,
Second-hand
clothing,
Smoky and fly-blown glass of lunch-rooms,
Odors of
rancid life...
Deadly uniformity
Of eyes and windows
Alike devoid of light...

Holes wherein life scratches--
Mangy life
Nosing to the gutter's
end...
Show-rooms and mimic pillars
Flaunting out of their gaudy
vestibules
Bosoms and posturing thighs...
Over all the Elevated
Droning like a bloated fly.
PROMENADE
Undulant rustlings,
Of oncoming silk,
Rhythmic, incessant,
Like
the motion of leaves...
Fragments of color
In glowing surprises...

Pink inuendoes
Hooded in gray
Like buds in a cobweb
Pearled at
dawn...
Glimpses of green
And blurs of gold
And delicate mauves

That snatch at youth...
And bodies all rosily
Fleshed for the
airing,
In warm velvety surges
Passing imperious, slow...
Women drift into the limousines
That shut like silken caskets
On
gems half weary of their glittering...
Lamps open like pale moon
flowers...
Arcs are radiant opals
Strewn along the dusk...
No
common lights invade.
And spires rise like litanies--
Magnificats of
stone
Over the white silence of the arcs,

Burning in perpetual
adoration.
THE FOG

Out of the lamp-bestarred and clouded dusk--
Snaring, illuding,
concealing,
Magically conjuring--
Turning to fairy-coaches

Beetle-backed limousines
Scampering under the great Arch--

Making a decoy of blue overalls
And mystery of a scarlet shawl--

Indolently--
Knowing no impediment of its sure advance--

Descends the fog.
FACES
A late snow beats
With cold white fists upon the tenements--

Hurriedly drawing blinds and shutters,
Like tall old slatterns
Pulling
aprons about their heads.
Lights slanting out of Mott Street
Gibber out,
Or dribble through
bar-room slits,
Anonymous shapes
Conniving behind shuttered
panes
Caper and disappear...
Where the Bowery
Is throbbing like
a fistula
Back of her ice-scabbed fronts.
Livid faces
Glimmer in furtive doorways,
Or spill out of the black
pockets of alleys,
Smears of faces like muddied beads,
Making a
ghastly rosary
The night mumbles over
And the snow with its
devilish and silken whisper...
Patrolling arcs
Blowing shrill blasts
over the Bread Line
Stalk them as they pass,
Silent as though
accouched of the darkness,
And the wind noses among them,
Like a skunk
That roots about the heart...
Colder:
And the Elevated slams upon the silence
Like a ponderous
door.
Then all is still again,
Save for the wind fumbling over
The
emptily swaying faces--
The wind rummaging

Like an old Jew...
Faces in glimmering rows...
(No sign of the abject life--
Not even a
blasphemy...)
But the spindle legs keep time
To a limping rhythm,

And the shadows twitch upon the snow

Convulsively--
As though death played
With some ungainly dolls.
LABOR
DEBRIS
I love those spirits
That men stand off and point at,
Or shudder and
hood up their souls--
Those ruined ones,
Where Liberty has lodged
an hour
And passed like flame,
Bursting asunder the too small
house.
DEDICATION
I would be a torch unto your hand,
A lamp upon your forehead, Labor,

In the wild darkness before the Dawn
That I shall never see...
We shall advance together, my Beloved,
Awaiting the mighty
ushering...
Together