162 City poems

Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants, the theatres, the grocery stores; I ride the cars and hear of Mrs. Bedford’s teeth and Albuquerque, strikes unsettled, someone’s simply marvelous date, news of the German Jews, the baseball scores, storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turn the pages of a thousand books to read the names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendhal, André Gide, Ouspenski; note the terms: obscurantism, factorize, fagaceous, endocarp; descend the nervous stairs to hear the broken ends of songs that float through city air. In Osnabrück and Ogden, on the Passamaquoddy Bay, in Ahmednagar, Waco (Neb.), in Santa Fé, propelled by zeros, zinc, and zephyrs, always I’m pursued by thoughts of what I am, authority, remembrance, food, the letter on the mezzanine, the unemployed, dogs’ lonely faces, pianos and decay. Plurality is all. I sympathize, but cannot grieve too long for those who wear their dialectics on their sleeves. The pattern’s one I sometimes rather like; there’s really nothing wrong with it for some. But I should add: It doesn’t wear for long, before I push the elevator bell and quickly leave.

It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust. On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating. A blonde chorus girl clicks: he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday. Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would write, as are light bulbs in daylight. I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER

On the warm Sunday afternoons And every evening in the Spring and Summer When the night hurries the late home-corner And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes Float from the open windows and jar Against the voices of children and the hum of a car; When the city noises commingle and melt With a restless something half-seen, half-felt— I see them always there, Upon the low, smooth wall before the church; That row of little girls who sit and stare Like sparrows on a granite perch. They come in twittering couples or walk alone To their gray bough of stone, Sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes as many as five— But always they sit there on the narrow coping Bright-eyed and solemn, scarcely hoping To see more than what is merely moving and alive. . . They hear the couples pass; the lisp of happy feet Increases and the night grows suddenly sweet. . . Before the quiet church that smells of death They sit. And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath And reaches out and plucks them by the hand And calls them boldly, whispering to each In some strange speech They tremble to but cannot understand. It thrills and troubles them, as one by one, The days run off like water through a sieve; While, with a gaze as candid as the sun, Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive, They come and sit,— A part of life and yet apart from it.

In the lost city of gold that was Oroville, the golden age had come and gone. I was the only person in the vast movie house. What was showing that winter night thirty years ago? The Gold Rush, of course, as if it had arrived in 1925 and never left. Gilt dripped from the ceiling. Stains mapped their worthless claims. And there I was, still in that cheap coat the color of slush. Who was beside me? Not you, Love; you were on the other side of the country, so it was the cold that threw an icy arm around my shoulders. A heater coughed, not meaning to intrude. The projector rattled to life and, down a mineshaft of dusty light, a blizzard swirled toward the blank screen of my past. O silent film of my life, unwind! It wasn't the wind but the silence that howled, ecstatic in the emptiness at the heart of the West. But Chaplin had a mystic's hunger for the finer things: he boiled his boot. He wound a shoelace on a fork. He tasted shame for me, and found it sweet.

How much greener is paint than grass, especially in winter.

Four feet up, under the bruise-blue Fingered hat-felt, the eyes begin. The sly brim Slips over the sky, street after street, and nobody Knows, to stop it. It will cover The whole world, if there is time. Fifty years’ Start in gray the eyes have; you will never Catch up to where they are, too clever And always walking, the legs not long but The boots big with wide smiles of darkness Going round and round at their tops, climbing. They are almost to the knees already, where There should have been ankles to stop them. So must keep walking all the time, hurry, for The black sea is down where the toes are And swallows and swallows all. A big coat Can help save you. But eyes push you down; never Meet eyes. There are hands in hands, and love Follows its furs into shut doors; who Shall be killed first? Do not look up there: The wind is blowing the building-tops, and a hand Is sneaking the whole sky another way, but It will not escape. Do not look up. God is On High. He can see you. You will die.

Can you imagine the air filled with smoke? It was. The city was vanishing before noon or was it earlier than that? I can't say because the light came from nowhere and went nowhere. This was years ago, before you were born, before your parents met in a bus station downtown. She'd come on Friday after work all the way from Toledo, and he'd dressed in his only suit. Back then we called this a date, some times a blind date, though they'd written back and forth for weeks. What actually took place is now lost. It's become part of the mythology of a family, the stories told by children around the dinner table. No, they aren't dead, they're just treated that way, as objects turned one way and then another to catch the light, the light overflowing with smoke. Go back to the beginning, you insist. Why is the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work. Work was something that thrived on fire, that without fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life. We came out into the morning air, Bernie, Stash, Williams, and I, it was late March, a new war was starting up in Asia or closer to home, one that meant to kill us, but for a moment the air held still in the gray poplars and elms undoing their branches. I understood the moon for the very first time, why it came and went, why it wasn't there that day to greet the four of us. Before the bus came a small black bird settled on the curb, fearless or hurt, and turned its beak up as though questioning the day. "A baby crow," someone said. Your father knelt down on the wet cement, his lunchbox balanced on one knee and stared quietly for a long time. "A grackle far from home," he said. One of the four of us mentioned tenderness, a word I wasn't used to, so it wasn't me. The bus must have arrived. I'm not there today. The windows were soiled. We swayed this way and that over the railroad tracks, across Woodward Avenue, heading west, just like the sun, hidden in smoke.

I believe in this stalled magnificence, this churning chaos of traffic, a beast with broken spine, its hoarse voice hooded in feathers and mist; the baffled eyes wink amber and slowly darken. Of men and women suddenly walking, stumbling with little sleighs in search of Tibetan houses — dust from a far-off mountain already whitens their shoulders. When evening falls in blurred heaps, a man losing his way among churches and schoolyards feels under his cold hand the stone thoughts of that city, impassable to all but a few children who went on into the hidden life of caves and winter fires, their faces glowing with disaster.

I Eastward the city with scarcely even a murmur turns in the soft dusk, the lights of it blur, the delicate spires are unequal as though the emollient dusk had begun to dissolve them... And the soft air-breathers, their soft bosoms rising and falling as ferns under water responding to some impalpably soft pressure, turn with the city, too. The petals of tenderness in them, their tentative ways of feeling, not quite reaching out but ever so gently half reaching out and withdrawing, withdrawing to where their feminine star is withdrawing, the planet that turns with them, faithfully always and softly... II And if there is something which is not soft in the city, such as a cry too hard for the soft mouth to hold, God puts a soft stop to it. Bending invisibly down, He breathes a narcosis over the panicky face upturned to entreat Him: a word as soft as morphine is the word that God uses, placing His soft hand over the mouth of the cryer before it has time to gather the force of a cry. It is almost as if no cry had ever been thought of... And, yes, over all, soft canopy over soft canopy, web over soft, soft web, gauze hung over gauze, the mysteries of the tall heaven, the tall and very soft heaven, are softest of all!

1 Moving over the hills, crossing the irrigation canals perfect and profuse in the mountains the streams of women and men walking under the high- tension wires over the brown hills in the multiple world of the fly