Out of fiery contacts... Rushing auras of steel Touching and whirled apart... Out of the charged phallases Of iron leaping Female and male, Complete, indivisible, one, Fused into light.
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.
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......
He walked under the shadow of the Hill Where men are fed into the fires And walled apart... Unarmed and alone, He summoned his mates from the pit's mouth Where tools rested on the floors...
The foreman's head slowly circling... White rims under yellow disks of eyes.... Gold hairs starting out of a blond scowl... Hovering... disappearing... recurring......
The earth is motionless And poised in space... A great bird resting in its flight Between the alleys of the stars. It is the wind's hour off.... The wind has nestled down among the corn.......
The ore in the crucible is pungent, smelling like acrid wine, It is dusky red, like the ebb of poppies, And purple, like the blood of elderberries. Surely it is a strong wine - juice distilled of the fierce iron....
Nasal intonations of light and clicking tongues... publicity of windows stoning me with pent-up cries... smells of abattoirs... smells of long-dead meat.
Rock-a-by baby, woolly and brown... (There's a shout at the door an' a big red light...) Lil' coon baby, mammy is down... Han's that hold yuh are steady an' white... ...
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,...
Your love was like moonlight turning harsh things to beauty, so that little wry souls reflecting each other obliquely as in cracked mirrors... beheld in your luminous spirit...
Indigo bulb of darkness Punctured by needle lights Through a fissure of brick canyon shutting out stars, And a sliver of moon Spigoting two high windows over the West river.... ...
Old plant of Asia - Mutilated vine Holding earth's leaping sap In every stem and shoot That lopped off, sprouts again - Why should you seek a plateau walled about, Whose garden is the world?
Do you remember Honey-melon moon Dripping thick sweet light Where Canal Street saunters off by herself among quiet trees? And the faint decayed patchouli - Fragrance of New Orleans...
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...
Come forth, you workers! Let the fires go cold - Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs - Let the iron run wild Like a red bramble on the floors - Leave the mill and the foundry and the mine...
Aren't there bigger things to talk about Than a window in Greenwich Village And hyacinths sprouting Like little puce poems out of a sick soul? Some cosmic hearsay -...