..
--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.
SPRING
A spring wind on the Bowery,
Blowing the fluff of night shelters
Off bedraggled garments,
And agitating the gutters, that eject little spirals of vapor
Like lewd growths.
Bare-legged children stamp in the puddles, splashing each other,
One--with a choir-boy's face
Twits me as I pass...
The word, like a muddied drop,
Seems to roll over and not out of
The bowed lips,
Yet dewy red
And sweetly immature.
People sniff the air with an upward look--
Even the mite of a girl
Who never plays...
Her mother smiles at her
With eyes like vacant lots
Rimming vistas of mean streets
And endless washing days...
Yet with sun on the lines
And a drying breeze.
The old candy woman
Shivers in the young wind.
Her eyes--littered with memories
Like ancient garrets,
Or dusty unaired rooms where someone died--
Ask nothing of the spring.
But a pale pink dream
Trembles about this young girl's body,
Draping it like a glowing aura.
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