Was there a wind? Tap... tap... Night pads upon the snow with moccasined feet... and it is still... so still... an eagle's feather might fall like a stone. Could there have been a storm......
Radiant notes piercing my narrow-chested room, beating down through my ceiling - smeared with unshapen belly-prints of dreams drifted out of old smokes - trillions of icily peltering notes...
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 -...
Secrets infesting my half-sleep... did you enter my wound from another wound brushing mine in a crowd... or did I snare you on my sharper edges as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up...
Skyscrapers... remote, unpartisan... Turning neither to the right nor left Your imperturbable fronts.... Austerely greeting the sun With one chilly finger of stone.......
We are old, Old as song. Before Rome was Or Cyrene. Mad nights knew us And old men's wives. We knew who spilled the sacred oil For young-gold harlots of the town.......
Spires of Grace Church, For you the workers of the world Travailed with the mountains... Aborting their own dreams Till the dream of you arose - Beautiful, swaddled in stone - Scorning their hands.
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. ...
(Shadows over a cradle... fire-light craning.... A hand throws something in the fire and a smaller hand runs into the flame and out again, singed and empty.... Shadows...
That day, in the slipping of torsos and straining flanks on the bloodied ooze of fields plowed by the iron, And the smoke bluish near earth and bronze in the sunshine floating like cotton-down,...
Last night I watched a star fall like a great pearl into the sea, Till my ego expanding encompassed sea and star, Containing both as in a trembling cup.
Hallo, Metropolitan - Ubiquitous windows staring all ways, Red eye notching the darkness. No use to ogle that slip of a moon. This midnight the moon, Playing virgin after all her encounters,...
There is music in the strong Deep-throated bush, Whisperings of song Heard in the leaves' hush - Ballads of the trees In tongues unknown - A reminiscent tone On minor keys... ...
Long vast shapes... cooled and flushed through with darkness.... Lidless windows Glazed with a flashy luster From some little pert cafe chirping up like a sparrow. And down among iron guts Piled silver...