The Tunnel

Performances, assortments, résumés—

Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights

Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,

Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces—

Mysterious kitchens. . . . You shall search them all.

Someday by heart you’ll learn each famous sight

And watch the curtain lift in hell’s despite;

You’ll find the garden in the third act dead,

Finger your knees—and wish yourself in bed

With tabloid crime-sheets perched in easy sight.

            Then let you reach your hat

            and go.

            As usual, let you—also

            walking down—exclaim

            to twelve upward leaving

            a subscription praise

            for what time slays.

Or can’t you quite make up your mind to ride;

A walk is better underneath the L a brisk

Ten blocks or so before? But you find yourself

Preparing penguin flexions of the arms,—

As usual you will meet the scuttle yawn:

The subway yawns the quickest promise home.

Be minimum, then, to swim the hiving swarms

Out of the Square, the Circle burning bright—

Avoid the glass doors gyring at your right,

Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright

—Quite unprepared rush naked back to light:

And down beside the turnstile press the coin

Into the slot. The gongs already rattle.

            And so

            of cities you bespeak

            subways, rivered under streets

            and rivers. . . . In the car

            the overtone of motion

            underground, the monotone

            of motion is the sound

            of other faces, also underground—

“Let’s have a pencil Jimmy—living now

at Floral Park

Flatbush—on the fourth of July—

like a pigeon’s muddy dream—potatoes

to dig in the field—travlin the town—too—

night after night—the Culver line—the

girls all shaping up—it used to be—”

Our tongues recant like beaten weather vanes.

This answer lives like verdigris, like hair

Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone;

And repetition freezes—“What

“what do you want? getting weak on the links?

fandaddle daddy don’t ask for change—IS THIS

FOURTEENTH it’s half past six she said—if

you don’t like my gate why did you

swing on it, why didja

swing on it

anyhow—”

            And somehow anyhow swing—

The phonographs of hades in the brain

Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love

A burnt match skating in a urinal—         

Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS

To brush some new presentiment of pain—         

“But I want service in this office SERVICE

I said—after

the show she cried a little afterwards but—”

Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?

Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,

Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind

In back forks of the chasms of the brain,—

Puffs from a riven stump far out behind

In interborough fissures of the mind . . . ?

And why do I often meet your visage here,

Your eyes like agate lanterns—on and on

Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?

—And did their riding eyes right through your side,

And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?

And Death, aloft,—gigantically down

Probing through you—toward me, O evermore!

And when they dragged your retching flesh,

Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore—

That last night on the ballot rounds, did you,

Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?

For Gravesend Manor change at Chambers Street.

The platform hurries along to a dead stop.

The intent escalator lifts a serenade

Stilly

Of shoes, umbrellas, each eye attending its shoe, then

Bolting outright somewhere above where streets

Burst suddenly in rain. . . . The gongs recur:

Elbows and levers, guard and hissing door.

Thunder is galvothermic here below. . . . The car

Wheels off. The train rounds, bending to a scream,

Taking the final level for the dive

Under the river—

And somewhat emptier than before,

Demented, for a hitching second, humps; then

Lets go. . . . Toward corners of the floor

Newspapers wing, revolve and wing.

Blank windows gargle signals through the roar.

And does the Daemon take you home, also,

Wop washerwoman, with the bandaged hair?

After the corridors are swept, the cuspidors—

The gaunt sky-barracks cleanly now, and bare,

O Genoese, do you bring mother eyes and hands

Back home to children and to golden hair?

Daemon, demurring and eventful yawn!

Whose hideous laughter is a bellows mirth

—Or the muffled slaughter of a day in birth—

O cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn

With antennae toward worlds that glow and sink;—

To spoon us out more liquid than the dim

Locution of the eldest star, and pack

The conscience navelled in the plunging wind,

Umbilical to call—and straightway die!

O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,

Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;

Condensed, thou takest all—shrill ganglia

Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.

And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,

The sod and billow breaking,—lifting ground,

—A sound of waters bending astride the sky

Unceasing with some Word that will not die . . . !

.        .        .        .        .

A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam,

Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the River.

I counted the echoes assembling, one after one,

Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers.

Lights, coasting, left the oily tympanum of waters;

The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky.

And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under,

Tossed from the coil of ticking towers. . . . Tomorrow,

And to be. . . . Hereby the River that is East—

Here at the waters’ edge the hands drop memory;

Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie.

How far away the star has pooled the sea—

Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?

Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,

                              O Hand of Fire

                                            gatherest—