WINDOWS

TIME-STONE

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,
Will break another date with you. 
You fuss an awful lot,
You flight of ledger books,
Overrun with multiple ant-black figures
Dancing on spindle legs
An interminable can-can. 
But I’d rather... like the cats in the alley... count time
By the silver whistle of a moonbeam
Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls,
Than all your tally of the sunsets,
Metropolitan, ticking among stars.

TRAIN WINDOW

Small towns
Crawling out of their green shirts... 
Tubercular towns
Coughing a little in the dawn... 
And the church... 
There is always a church
With its natty spire
And the vestibule—­
That’s where they whisper: 
Tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz... 
How many codes for a wireless whisper—­
And corn flatter than it should be
And those chits of leaves
Gadding with every wind? 
Small towns
From Connecticut to Maine: 
Tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz...tzz-tzz...

SCANDAL

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—­
As to whom—­it can’t be Mars! put the moon—­that way.... 
Or what winds do to canyons
Under the tall stars... 
Or even
How that old roué, Neptune,
Cranes over his bald-head moons
At the twinkling heel of a sky-scraper.

ELECTRICITY

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.

SKYSCRAPERS

Skyscrapers... remote, unpartisan... 
Turning neither to the right nor left
Your imperturbable fronts.... 
Austerely greeting the sun
With one chilly finger of stone.... 
I know your secrets... better than all the policemen
     like fat blue mullet along the avenues.

WALL STREET AT NIGHT

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
Throwing gray spatter of light... pale without heat... 
Like the pallor of dead bodies.

EAST RIVER