THE CITY DARK

In the early winter dusk the broken city dark

Seeps from the tunnels. Up towers and in gusty alleys,

The mathematical veil of generation has lit its torches

To light the rooms of the mated and unmated: the two

Fated behind you and four behind them in the matrix

Widening into the past, eight, sixteen, thirty-two,

Many as the crystal dream cells illuminating the city.

Even for those who sleep in the street there are lights.

Like a heavy winter sleep the long flint cold of the past

Spreads over the glinting dream-blisters of the city, asleep

Or awake, as if the streets were an image of the channels

Of time, with sixty-four, one hundred and twenty-eight,

The ancestral net of thousands only a couple of centuries back,

With its migrations and fortunes and hungers like an image

Of the city where the star-dispelling lights have climbed

And multiplied over the tenements and outlying suburbs

Like a far past of multitudes behind us in the glistering web

Of strands crossing, thousands and tens of thousands

Of lives coupled with their gains, passions, misfortunes.

Somewhere in the tangled alleyways, a rape. Somewhere

A spirit diffused winglike, blind along the stretched wires

Branching the dark city air or bundled under the streets,

Coursing surely to some one face like an ancient song Do re,

Re la sol sol. Somewhere misfortune, somewhere recognition.

Back here one died of starvation, here one thrived. Descendant,

The bitter city work and the shimmering maternal burden

Of music uncoil outward on the avenues through smoky bars,

By televisions, beyond sleepers while the oblivion of generation

Radiates backward and then forward homeward to the one voice

Or face like an underground pool, through its delicate lightshaft

Moonlit, a cistern of light, echoing in a chamber cellared under

The dark of the city pavement, the faintly glittering slabs.