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Twelve
o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a
lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Disolve the floors of memory
And all its clear
relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every
street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes
the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The
street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said,
"Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the
light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained
with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."
The memory throws up
high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted
branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past
two,
The street-lamp said,
"Remark the cat which
flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand
of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a
toy that was running along
the quay.
I could see
nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in
the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with
barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick
which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp
sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The
lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde
aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles
into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox
cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and
cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of
sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells
of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in
shuttered rooms
And cigarettes in corridors
And
cocktail smells in bars."
The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads
a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the
tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the
door, sleep, prepare for life."
The last twist
of the knife.
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