THREE stories up the town is Venice: there
The streets’ abrupt and windy rivers run
Among the badland brick, the domes of tar,
The mica prairie wheeling in the sun.
On crags of glass the sooty lichen twine;
Flowers of the wash in highland vineyards shine.
Along the banks of tile and metal mushroom,
The orange liners of the transit ply.
From bunks of plush the mariners behold
The hollow maelstrom with indifferent eye.
Serene to wreck, they loll and even read,
Their schooner reeling in a sea of speed.
The green pagoda, floating in the tree,
Honors the pauper and the drunk buffoon,
Slow Negroes too (the negatives of men)
Wearing their midnight faces even at noon.
All come and throw, like dice, the copper fare,
Win ships of glass and navigate the air.
Master the changes of all weather too:
When steeples quaver in the August glow,
Or windows in wet April spin like reels,
Or when the track’s a portico of snow.
Mostly at rung Noël, the frozen star
Hears all night long the heaven-skating car.
We float an eerie deep, as men that mark
The fabulous water in a keel of glass;
Beneath the bay of rippling window, loom
The tenant’s cave and honeycomb crevasse
Queer grots of mossy rug, crustacea pan,
Framing the sad and seahorse shape of man.
On nights of rain, the captain in the prow
Dares in great dark the iron-charted flood,
Follows a star of harbor green as mint,
Skirting disaster’s little eye of blood.
Is fortunate yet, for sudden in the night
Stations arrive like Indias of light.
Exotic foliage on the wooden shore
Fertile with ads: tobacco, rouge, and coke
Finer than flora swarm. Have proper care
From censoring pigeon, friend to lonely folk.
Here girls in jest or desperate or tight
(Like votive wax) their phone and hungers write.
What dreamer hung the hollow sky with ore?
No Merlin he, or caliph in a tale.
Some ne’er-do-well, some boy who liked to draw
Blueprinted first the levitating rail.
Rubbed a right lamp, and saw, when that was done,
A crowded city moving in the sun.
The crazy dream is record and charts time,
Gables the region with a frieze of steel.
Saturn is peeled of credit, on whose ring
Never the flash and thunder of such wheel,
Where no batons of hard momentum flail
Music of acrid iron from the rail.
As princes, wrecked and ragged, long pursued,
Show in some tone the grandeurs of their birth,
So we, who fever on a foreign bed,
Who beg for lust and moulder in sad earth,
Greatness remember, and with Viking eye
Storm the ancestral headlands of the sky.
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