Lola Ridge: Windows

 

Lola Ridge
(1873-1941)

WINDOWS

seven poems

 

TIME-STONE

  Hallo, Metropolitan–
  Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,
  Red eye notching the darkness.
  No use to ogle that slip of a moon.
  This midnight the moon,
  Playing virgin after all her encounters,
  Will break another date with you.
  You fuss an awful lot,
  You flight of ledger books,
  Overrun with multiple ant-black figures
  Dancing on spindle legs
  An interminable can-can.
  But I’d rather… like the cats in the alley… count time
  By the silver whistle of a moonbeam
  Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls,
  Than all your tally of the sunsets,
  Metropolitan, ticking among stars.

 

  TRAIN WINDOW

  Small towns
  Crawling out of their green shirts…
  Tubercular towns
  Coughing a little in the dawn…
  And the church…
  There is always a church
  With its natty spire
  And the vestibule–
  That’s where they whisper:
  Tzz-tzz… tzz-tzz… tzz-tzz…
  How many codes for a wireless whisper–
  And corn flatter than it should be
  And those chits of leaves
  Gadding with every wind?
  Small towns
  From Connecticut to Maine:
  Tzz-tzz… tzz-tzz…tzz-tzz…

 

  SCANDAL

  Aren’t there bigger things to talk about
  Than a window in Greenwich Village
  And hyacinths sprouting
  Like little puce poems out of a sick soul?
  Some cosmic hearsay–
  As to whom–it can’t be Mars! put the moon–that way….
  Or what winds do to canyons
  Under the tall stars…
  Or even
  How that old roue, Neptune,
  Cranes over his bald-head moons
  At the twinkling heel of a sky-scraper.

 

  ELECTRICITY

  Out of fiery contacts…
  Rushing auras of steel
  Touching and whirled apart…
  Out of the charged phallases
  Of iron leaping
  Female and male,
  Complete, indivisible, one,
  Fused into light.

 

  SKYSCRAPERS

  Skyscrapers… remote, unpartisan…
  Turning neither to the right nor left
  Your imperturbable fronts….
  Austerely greeting the sun
  With one chilly finger of stone….
  I know your secrets… better than all the policemen
     like fat blue mullet along the avenues.

 

  WALL STREET AT NIGHT

  Long vast shapes… cooled and flushed through with darkness….
  Lidless windows
  Glazed with a flashy luster
  From some little pert cafe chirping up like a sparrow.
  And down among iron guts
  Piled silver
  Throwing gray spatter of light… pale without heat…
  Like the pallor of dead bodies.

 

  EAST RIVER

  Dour river
  Jaded with monotony of lights
  Diving off mast heads….
  Lights mad with creating in a river… turning its sullen back…
  Heave up, river…
  Vomit back into the darkness your spawn of light….
  The night will gut what you give her.

 

LOLA RIDGE POETRY
kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: Ridge, Lola