A late snow beats <br />With cold white fists upon the tenements - <br />Hurriedly drawing blinds and shutters, <br />Like tall old slatterns <br />Pulling aprons about their heads. <br /> <br />Lights slanting out of Mott Street <br />Gibber out, <br />Or dribble through bar-room slits, <br />Anonymous shapes <br />Conniving behind shuttered panes <br />Caper and disappear… <br />Where the Bowery <br />Is throbbing like a fistula <br />Back of her ice-scabbed fronts. <br /> <br />Livid faces <br />Glimmer in furtive doorways, <br />Or spill out of the black pockets of alleys, <br />Smears of faces like muddied beads, <br />Making a ghastly rosary <br />The night mumbles over <br />And the snow with its devilish and silken whisper… <br />Patrolling arcs <br />Blowing shrill blasts over the Bread Line <br />Stalk them as they pass, <br />Silent as though accouched of the darkness, <br />And the wind noses among them, <br />Like a skunk <br />That roots about the heart… <br /> <br />Colder: <br />And the Elevated slams upon the silence <br />Like a ponderous door. <br />Then all is still again, <br />Save for the wind fumbling over <br />The emptily swaying faces - <br />The wind rummaging <br />Like an old Jew… <br /> <br />Faces in glimmering rows… <br />(No sign of the abject life - <br />Not even a blasphemy…) <br />But the spindle legs keep time <br />To a limping rhythm, <br />And the shadows twitch upon the snow <br />Convulsively - <br />As though death played <br />With some ungainly dolls.<br /><br />Lola Ridge<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/faces-39/
