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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.