Chapter III

With groping majesty, the endless crowd
Pounds its searching chant of feet
Down this tawdrily resplendent street.
People stray into a burlesque theatre
Framed with scarlet, blankly rotund girls.
Here a burly cattle-raiser walks
With the grace of wind-swept prairie grass.
Behind him steps a slender clerk
Tendering his sprightly stridency
To the stolid, doll-like girl beside him.
At his side a heavy youth
Dully stands beneath his swaggering mask;
And a smiling man in black and white
Walks, like some Pierrot grown middle-aged.

Mutely twinkling fragments of a romance:
Tiny lights stand over this cabaret.
Men and women jovially emboldened
Stroll beneath the curtained entrance,
And their laughs, like softly brazen cow-bells,
Change the scene to a strange Pastoral.
Hectic shepherdesses drunk with night,
Women mingle their coquettish colours....
Suddenly, a man leaps out
From the doorway’s blazing pallor,
Smashing into the drab sidewalk.
His drunken lips and eyelids break apart
Like a clown in sudden suicide.
Then the mottled nakedness
Of the scene comes, like a blow.

Stoically crushed in hovering grey
Night lies coldly on this street.
Momentary sounds crash into night
Like ghostly curses stifled in their birth....
And over all the blankly box-like buildings
Raise their sodden architecture
Into the poised lyric of the sky.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained.