Look at the night!
The infernal Jersey shore battled the oblivion with Mazda bulbs, neon, sizzling arcs, and the globe's shadow eliminated all but beauty. Lights swam on the river. Antediluvian animals with pairs of red-green eyes swam up and down the Hudson. Fish from the abyss—mammoth—with ladders of light along their shining sides surfaced and sloshed in the current, hooting and humming. Ah, Jersey! Fields of phosphorescent flowers and hills set out with lantern-bearing trees! Night-blooming paradise! The magic is our own—collective. What matter that beneath one particular lavender string of streetlights mad boys pitch clinking pennies—curse—push frowsy, young, reluctant girls up alleyways—and mad, obscene old men tipple in bars that reek with millenniums of human hellishness—and mad, subpersonal old women maliciously fling slops in the yards of their neighbors? This is not the one man but his panorama.
For can they not, all of them, stinking of their sweat and overswarming with diseased intent, look east across their river and see a pattern of illumination that would have made Nero hang himself with envy and Rameses change his gods?
Manhattan!
They look. Great Heaven, they never see!
Directly below, on the sidewalk, a woman went one by one through the circular pools of street light. I could hear her heels crossing my life and every time she reached a new radiant circle I could see she had golden hair. The very beasts in the river ceased boasting to let her print the small, enchanting sound of woman's passage on the attentive dark. Her dress was green.
I soon took my leave.
7
My double bed was a sea and I was its derelict.
I read an article by a steelmaker that tish-pished those who are concerned over the possible exhaustion of America's iron ore. Run out in twenty years? this tycoon asked. Ridiculous! There is iron enough for a century and no corporation is anxious at all, where such extensive futures can be seen.