Flotsam

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 . . .

Nothing to guess at . . .
Save the darkness above
Crouching like a great cat.

In the dim-lit square,
Where disheveled trees
Tustle with the wind—the wind like a scythe Mowing their last leaves
Arcs shimmering through a greenish haze— Pale oval arcs
Like ailing virgins,
Each out of a halo circumscribed,
Pallidly staring . . .

Figures drift upon the benches
With no more rustle than a dropped leaf settling— Slovenly figures like untied
parcels,
And papers wrapped about their knees
Huddled one to the other,
Cringing to the wind—
The sided wind,
Leaving no breach untried . . .
So 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.