The Fifth-Floor Window

Walls . . . iridescent with eyes
that stare into the courtyard
at the still thing lying
in the turned-back snow . . .
stark precipice of walls
with a foam of white faces
lathering their stone lips . . .
faces of the shawled women
the walls pour forth without aim
under the vast pallor of the sky.

They point at the fifth-floor window
and whisper one to the other:
“It’s hard on a man out of work
an’ the mother gone out of his door
with a younger lover . . . ”

The blanched morning stares
in like a face flattened against the pane where the little girl used to cry all day
with a feeble and goading cry.
Her father, with his eyes at bay
before the vague question of the light,
says that she fell . . .
Between his twitching lips
a stump of cigarette
smolders, like a burning root.

Only the wind was abroad
in high cold hours
of the icy and sightless night with back to the stars— night growing white and
still as a pillar of salt and the snow mushing without sound— when something
hurtled through the night and drifted like a larger snow-flake
in the trek of the blind snow
that stumbled over it in heaps—
only white-furred wind
pawed at the fifth-floor window
and nosed cigarette-butts on the sill . . .
till the window closed down softly
on the silvery fleece of wind
that tore and left behind its flying fringes.

Now the wind
down the valley of the tenements
sweeps in weakened rushes
and meddles with the clothes-lines
where little white pinafores sway stiffly like dead geese.
Over the back-yards
that are laid out smooth and handsome as a corpse under the seamless snow, the
sky is a vast ash-pit
where the buried sun
rankles in a livid spot.