Walls . . . iridescent with eyes
That stare into the courtyard
At the still thing lying
In the turned-back snow:
Stark precipices of walls,
With a foam of white faces
Lathering their stone lips—
Jabbering, craning
Faces of the shawled women
The walls pour forth without aim
Under the vast pallor of the sky.
They point at the fifth-floor window
And whisper one to the other:
“It’s hard on a man out of work-
And the mother’gone out of his door
With a younger lover …”
Morning stares in like a blenched face flattened against
the pane
Where the little girl used to cry all day
With a feeble and goading cry.
Her father says she fell … with his eyes at bay
Before the vague question of the light.
Between his twitching lips
A stump of cigarette
Smolders . . . like a burning root.
Only the wind was abroad
In the high cold hours
Of the icy and sightless night
With back to the stars-
Night growing white and still as a pillar of salt,
And the snow mushing without sound-
When something hurtled through the night
And drifted, like a larger snow-flake,
In the treck of the blind snow
That stumbled over it in heaps.
Only the white-furred wind
Pawed at the fifth-floor window
And nosed cigarette-butts on the sill:
Till the window closed down softly
On the silvery fleece of wind
That tore and left behind its flying fringes.
Now the wind
Down the valley of the tenements
Sweeps in weakened rushes,
And meddles with the clothes-lines
Where little white pinafores sway stiffy
Like dead geese.
The women hurry shivering indoors.
Over the back yards,
That are laid out smooth and innocent as a corpse
Under the seamless snow,
The sky is like a vast ash-pit
Where the buried sun
Rankles in a livid spot.
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