The City (1925)

T
1

Under this Luxemburg of heaven,
upright capstan,
small eagles. . . .
is the port of N.Y. . . . .

gilders, stampers, pen makers, goldbeaters,

apprehensions of thunder
speed
the whore
indifference
son
glioma

Tammany, McCoy,
the bonze doors of the Guarantee trust,
the copper spandrels.

Orangerie and game room
with Old english tall twisted
stem engraved goblets
and Royal Copenhagen porcelain.

A mutton fat jade
Chien Lung
bowl
a toilet bottle
amethyst
stopper & monogram shield.

A technical display.
You bought a perfume bottle
and a Chinese shawl.
Susannah set a headstone in St. Paul.

I’m inside waiting for a surprise
I’m in love with the girl on the Wabash
I’m alone with a hand in my hand
and a pair of wonderful eyes

but I’m blue
I have to speak
I want to do
I want to see
the sights obscure me
the facts secure me

The Maine sails out to sea
the undertaker drives to Hartford

Yesterday the ducks flew in a mackerel sky.
I had the allotropes of vision,
something historical at the controls
of North america,
heavyweight and metaphorical.

What are the facts?
they swept the city hall today
they set the lathe dogs
trimmed the tool posts
scraped the bearings
shellacked the knots,
they set the capital
upon the shaft.

Somebody has to drive the spikes
pitch the gears
oil the cams
somebody has to kill the whisky
somebody has to speak

What are the facts?


2

Inland is
the goat in open field.
The milk is marketed.
Attend our table.

The sand
and fluorspar
and the soda ash
make a blue
aventurine glass
for this city,
a lion rampant
on his hind feet, royally
clawing, tail whipped up.


3

come, great city,
give us that old-time vaudeville

”During the water-movement
of the French horns
and the lovelace of a violin
a wire from my girl,
`I love you but I need a deposit.‘
Even the ventriloquist’s dummy laughed
after we combed his pretty red hair
and set him on his tricycle.“

Do you know the story of Sal?
She was a lonely little gal
with the lovelight in her eyes
and Mr. H. H. at the ivories
and she was happy (honest to God)

In the season of Romain effects
and synthetic American lights
she drove into a California suburb
in a high-compression gull-line Suiza
rolling her Klieg eyes
like revolving doors

whereupon the jackass
full of animal gas
floated blissfully
into the dance
of the seven veils,
yakking, ‘I have that
funny feeling again,
it must be love.’

Commentary: nothing
so marks the copulative man
as a corkscrew and a bottle opener.

Question:
Could you stand an old man
to a cup of coffee?
It’s hard walking
with this silver plate
in my head.

Come, great city,
you have full powers
of attorney to protect your friends.


4

Immigrants from Warsaw
move into a furnished room
close to the stores
under St. Chrysostom’s carillon
with a porcelain pitcher
and bath and hand towels
on the bed rails.
A new sign appears
in the ground-floor window:
Smocking, Hemstitching, Rhinestone Setting

Our hour from here
a loggia
above the pepper trees
a tiny cascade and vines
above the bath house
men and women driving
on the fairway, laughing

surrounded by Galloway
pottery, garden furniture
and white daisies.


5

When the light sprang from the sea, blowing,
the window sintered and blew like Venus
revealing my tenderness
and many minds
the way a night shot
discovers a beast drinking
and my responsibilities
eating me
as dogs eat gizzard.

I saw the city
changed
set up like laboratory glassware,
amines of herring brine,
the malic acid of the sea buckthorn,
glass-enclosed prescription balance,
steel and agate, Fabrik Koln
a physics clear as alcohol,
La Vita Nuova, I hardly knew.

Creditors dined at the Cliquot Club,
they read the papers, trade changed.
Their horses died, the big-bellied;
their dogs slept in the steam heat.

An ambulance with modest
glass doors and a silver cross
keeps night watch:

A surgeon.
Delicate nickel-plated
instruments are laid on trays.

Illuminated on the operating table
naked glassblowers,
gunsmiths, barbers, clerks, importers,
old men from hotels, pink and tailored,
naphtha-smelling Irish priests,
cravat-and-boy face of the movie usher,
Frankel, Shmulik, Old Country watchmakers

then a white horse in the park,
cigars and politics.
The city wrapped in cellophane,
an act-born eggshape
twisted like Ugolino

one sea-water,
one circulatory system
of man observing his magnificent urea.
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Imitations of Horace by Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere
(Horace, Epistles II.i.267)
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
Read Poem
0
128
Rating:

The Swamp Angel by Herman Melville
Herman Melville
There is a coal-black Angel
With a thick Afric lip,
And he dwells (like the hunted and harried)
In a swamp where the green frogs dip.
But his face is against a City
Which is over a bay of the sea,
And he breathes with a breath that is blastment,
And dooms by a far decree.
Read Poem
0
127
Rating:

from The Seasons: Winter by James Thomson
James Thomson
See, Winter comes to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train—
Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme,
These, that exalt the soul to solemn thought
And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms!
Congenial horrors, hail! With frequent foot,
Pleas’d have I, in my cheerful morn of life,
When nurs’d by careless solitude I liv’d
And sung of Nature with unceasing joy,
Pleas’d have I wander’d through your rough domain;
Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure;
Heard the winds roar, and the big torrent burst;
Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew’d
In the grim evening-sky. Thus pass’d the time,
Till through the lucid chambers of the south
Read Poem
0
155
Rating:

Today We Fly by Curzio Malaparte
Curzio Malaparte
One Sunday morning,
instead of studying The Illiad,
I escaped with Bino to Florence,
to see what miracles the aviator Manissero
would perform.

Whether he would demonstrate the art of Daedalus
or the folly of Icarus.

We found the whole city festooned with banners
Read Poem
0
133
Rating:

Out Here Even Crows Commit Suicide by Colleen J. McElroy
Colleen J. McElroy
In a world where all the heroes
are pilots with voices like God
he brought her a strand of some woman’s

hair to wear on her wing.
She looked sideways at the ground
silent behind the cloudy film covering

her eyes knowing she would be his
forever. They cruised the city nights
Read Poem
0
111
Rating:

Morning Song and Evening Walk by Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez
1.

Tonite in need of you
and God
I move imperfect
through this ancient city.

Quiet. No one hears
No one feels the tears
of multitudes.
Read Poem
0
150
Rating:

Entirely by Louis MacNeice
Louis MacNeice
If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.
Read Poem
0
293
Rating:

Encounter in Buffalo by Mary Barnard
Mary Barnard
The country lies flat, expressionless as the face of a stranger.
Not one hillock shelters a buried bone. The city:
a scene thin as a theater backdrop, where no doors open,
no streets extend beyond the view from the corner.

Only the railroad embankment is high, shaggy with grass.
Only the freight, knuckling a red sun under its wheels,
drags familiar box-car shapes down long perspectives
of childhood meals and all crossings at sunset.
Read Poem
0
114
Rating:

O Ye Tongues by Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
First Psalm

Let there be a God as large as a sunlamp to laugh his heat at you.

Let there be an earth with a form like a jigsaw and let it fit for all of ye.

Let there be the darkness of a darkroom out of the deep. A worm room.

Let there be a God who sees light at the end of a long thin pipe and lets it in.

Let God divide them in half.

Let God share his Hoodsie.

Let the waters divide so that God may wash his face in first light.
Read Poem
0
149
Rating:

Jenny by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“Vengeance of Jenny’s case! Fie on her! Never name her, child!”—Mrs. Quickly Lazy laughing languid Jenny,
Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea,
Read Poem
0
167
Rating:

Kalamazoo by Vachel Lindsay
Vachel Lindsay
Once, in the city of Kalamazoo,
The gods went walking, two and two,
With the friendly phoenix, the stars of Orion,
The speaking pony and singing lion.
For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart
Lived the girl with the innocent heart.

Thenceforth the city of Kalamazoo
Was the envied, intimate chum of the sun.
He rose from a cave by the principal street.
The lions sang, the dawn-horns blew,
And the ponies danced on silver feet.
He hurled his clouds of love around;
Deathless colors of his old heart
Draped the houses and dyed the ground.
Read Poem
0
143
Rating:

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Read Poem
0
160
Rating:

Our Willie by Henry Timrod
Henry Timrod
’T was merry Christmas when he came,
Our little boy beneath the sod;
And brighter burned the Christmas flame,
And merrier sped the Christmas game,
Because within the house there lay
A shape as tiny as a fay—
The Christmas gift of God!
In wreaths and garlands on the walls
The holly hung its ruby balls,
The mistletoe its pearls;
And a Christmas tree’s fantastic fruits
Woke laughter like a choir of flutes
From happy boys and girls.
For the mirth, which else had swelled as shrill
As a school let loose to its errant will,
Read Poem
0
140
Rating:

Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough by Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
The village street its haunted mansion lacks,
And from the sign is gone Sibylla's name,
And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks—
Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men
To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Read Poem
0
140
Rating:

Sohrab and Rustum by Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
An Episode AND the first grey of morning fill'd the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.
Read Poem
0
143
Rating:

October 1973 by Carolyn Kizer
Carolyn Kizer
Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New York
Looking for help for you, Nicanor.
But my few friends who are rich or influential
were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel suites.
They had gone to the opera, or flown for the weekend to Bermuda.
At last I found one or two of them at home,
preparing for social engagements,
absently smiling, as they tried on gown after gown
Read Poem
0
128
Rating:

Summer Images by John Clare
John Clare
Now swarthy Summer, by rude health embrowned,
Precedence takes of rosy fingered Spring;
And laughing Joy, with wild flowers prank'd, and crown'd,
A wild and giddy thing,
And Health robust, from every care unbound,
Come on the zephyr's wing,
And cheer the toiling clown.
Read Poem
0
119
Rating:

Ars Poetica? by Czeslaw Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.
Read Poem
0
154
Rating:

from “Poems for Moscow” by Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
From my hands—take this city not made by hands,
my strange, my beautiful brother.

Take it, church by church—all forty times forty churches,
and flying up the roofs, the small pigeons;

And Spassky Gates—and gates, and gates—
where the Orthodox take off their hats;

And the Chapel of Stars—refuge chapel—
where the floor is—polished by tears;
Read Poem
0
134
Rating:

Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"

II
Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierc'd by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
Read Poem
0
156
Rating: