I
AT street washed with violet Writes like a tablet Of living here; that pavement Is the metal embodiment Of living here; those terraces Filled with dumb presences Lobbed over mattresses, Lusts and repentances, Ardours and solaces, Passions and hatreds And love in brass bedsteads . . . Lost now in emptiness Deep now in darkness Nothing but nakedness, Rails like a ribbon And sickness of carbon Dying in distances.
II
EN, from the skeletons of trams, Gazing at lighted rooms, you'll find The black and Röntgen diagrams Of window-plants across the blind That print their knuckleduster sticks, Their buds of gum, against the light Like negatives of candlesticks Whose wicks are lit by fluorite; And shapes look out, or bodies pass, Between the darkness and the flare, Between the curtain and the glass, Of men and women moving there. So through the moment's needle-eye, Like phantoms in the window-chink, Their faces brush you as they fly, Fixed in the shutters of a blink; But whose they are, intent on what, Who knows?
They rattle into void, Stars of a film without a plot, Snippings of idiot celluloid.
