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
Dour river
Jaded with monotony of lights
Diving off mast heads….
Lights mad with creating in a river… turning its sullen back…
Heave up, river…
Vomit back into the darkness your spawn of light….
The night will gut what you give her.
SECRETS
INTERIM
The earth is motionless
And poised in space…
A great bird resting in its flight
Between the alleys of the stars.
It is the wind's hour off….
The wind has nestled down among the corn….
The two speak privately together,
Awaiting the whirr of wings.
AFTER STORM
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… mad-tossing golden mane on the neck of the wind… tearing up the sky… loose-flapping like a tent about the ice-capped stars?