Last Trams

I

THAT street washed with violet

Writes like a tablet

Of living here; that pavement

Is the metal embodiment

Of living here; those terraces

Filled with dumb presences

Lobbed over mattresses,

Lusts and repentances,

Ardours and solaces,

Passions and hatreds

And love in brass bedsteads . . .

Lost now in emptiness

Deep now in darkness

Nothing but nakedness,

Rails like a ribbon

And sickness of carbon

Dying in distances.

II

THEN, from the skeletons of trams,

Gazing at lighted rooms, you'll find

The black and Röntgen diagrams

Of window-plants across the blind

That print their knuckleduster sticks,

Their buds of gum, against the light

Like negatives of candlesticks

Whose wicks are lit by fluorite;

And shapes look out, or bodies pass,

Between the darkness and the flare,

Between the curtain and the glass,

Of men and women moving there.

So through the moment's needle-eye,

Like phantoms in the window-chink,

Their faces brush you as they fly,

Fixed in the shutters of a blink;

But whose they are, intent on what,

Who knows? They rattle into void,

Stars of a film without a plot,

Snippings of idiot celluloid.