That I, who have passed so many lights,
  Should carry your eyes
  Like swinging lanterns?

CACTUS SEED

Radiant notes piercing my narrow-chested room, beating down through my ceiling— smeared with unshapen belly-prints of dreams drifted out of old smokes— trillions of icily peltering notes out of just one canary, all grown to song as a plant to its stalk, from too long craning at a sky-light and a square of second-hand blue.

Silvery-strident throat— so assiduously serenading my brain, flinching under the glittering hail of your notes— were you not safe behind… rats know what thickness of… plastered wall… I might fathom your golden delirium with throttle of finger and thumb shutting valve of bright song.

II

  But if… away off… on a fork of grassed earth
  socketing an inlet reach of blue water…
  if canaries (do they sing out of cages?)
  flung such luminous notes,
  they would sink in the spirit…
  lie germinal…
  housed in the soul as a seed in the earth…
  to break forth at spring with the crocuses into young smiles
       on the mouth.
  Or glancing off buoyantly,
  radiate notes in one key
  with the sparkle of rain-drops
  on the petal of a cactus flower
  focusing the just-out sun.

Cactus… why cactus? God… God… somewhere… away off… cactus flowers, star-yellow ray out of spiked green, and empties of sky roll you over and over like a mother her baby in long grass. And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees, pricking multiple leaves at his amazing story.

WINDOWS

TIME-STONE

  Hallo, Metropolitan—
  Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,
  Red eye notching the darkness.
  No use to ogle that slip of a moon.
  This midnight the moon,
  Playing virgin after all her encounters,
  Will break another date with you.
  You fuss an awful lot,
  You flight of ledger books,
  Overrun with multiple ant-black figures
  Dancing on spindle legs
  An interminable can-can.
  But I'd rather… like the cats in the alley… count time
  By the silver whistle of a moonbeam
  Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls,
  Than all your tally of the sunsets,
  Metropolitan, ticking among stars.

TRAIN WINDOW

  Small towns
  Crawling out of their green shirts…
  Tubercular towns
  Coughing a little in the dawn…
  And the church…
  There is always a church
  With its natty spire
  And the vestibule—
  That's where they whisper:
  Tzz-tzz… tzz-tzz… tzz-tzz…
  How many codes for a wireless whisper—
  And corn flatter than it should be
  And those chits of leaves
  Gadding with every wind?
  Small towns
  From Connecticut to Maine:
  Tzz-tzz… tzz-tzz…tzz-tzz…

SCANDAL

  Aren't there bigger things to talk about
  Than a window in Greenwich Village
  And hyacinths sprouting
  Like little puce poems out of a sick soul?
  Some cosmic hearsay—
  As to whom—it can't be Mars! put the moon—that way….
  Or what winds do to canyons
  Under the tall stars…
  Or even
  How that old roué, Neptune,
  Cranes over his bald-head moons
  At the twinkling heel of a sky-scraper.

ELECTRICITY

  Out of fiery contacts…
  Rushing auras of steel
  Touching and whirled apart…
  Out of the charged phallases
  Of iron leaping
  Female and male,
  Complete, indivisible, one,
  Fused into light.

SKYSCRAPERS

  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?

  Cool, sheer and motionless
  the frosted pines
  are jeweled with a million flaming points
  that fling their beauty up in long white sheaves
  till they catch hands with stars.
  Could there have been a wind
  that haled them by the hair….
  and blinding
  blue-forked
  flowers of the lightning
  in their leaves?
  Tap… tap…
  slow-ticking centuries…
  Soft as bare feet upon the snow…
  faint… lulling as heard rain
  upon heaped leaves….
  Silence
  builds her wall
  about a dream impaled.

SECRETS

  Secrets
  infesting my half-sleep…
  did you enter my wound from another wound
  brushing mine in a crowd…
  or did I snare you on my sharper edges
  as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up
  carries off spiders on its wings?

  Secrets,
  running over my soul without sound,
  only when dawn comes tip-toeing
  ushered by a suave wind,
  and dreams disintegrate
  like breath shapes in frosty air,
  I shall overhear you, bare-foot,
  scatting off into the darkness….
  I shall know you, secrets
  by the litter you have left
  and by your bloody foot-prints.

POTPOURRI

  Do you remember
  Honey-melon moon
  Dripping thick sweet light
  Where Canal Street saunters off by herself among quiet