City and Everyday Life

Big Bessie’s feet hurt like nobody’s business, but she stands—bigly—under the unruly scrutiny, stands in the wild weed. In the wild weed she is a citizen.

Maud went to college. Sadie stayed at home. Sadie scraped life With a fine-tooth comb.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull, Impose their shots, throwing the nights away. We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill, Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

My steps along this street Resound in another street In which I hear my steps Passing along this street In which Only the mist is real.

The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal, Marked by the monument which no one Now remembers.

At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s We drank our liquor straight, Some went upstairs with Margery, And some, alas, with Kate.

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway… He did a lazy sway… To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

The New York dawn has four columns of mud and a hurricane of black doves that paddle in putrescent waters.

The light is buried under chains and noises in impudent challenge of rootless science. Through the suburbs sleepless people stagger, as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood.

We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels Over the paving.

But at my back from time to time I hear 3 The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water.

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them—

I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor.

Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower, your flock of bridges is bleating this morning. 1

We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.

Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.