Street Magnetism from Issue 15
Noontimes, between snoozing lions,
the steps of the New York Public Library
became an amphitheater in wait. Who
will command attention? One lunchtime
it was a young woman wearing (as I
remember) a sort of clown suit, elate with
the daring of the totally out-of-it, reporting
on how come they’d sent her to Bellevue:
“I’m electric! I have radioactivity
in my fingers!” —and giving so winsome
a demonstration, she had every one of
us lunch-hour loungers there with her,
ready to follow her, magnetized
by those rays, or whatever they
were, straight into the dazzling
non sequitur of her madness.
Lights in a Cold Season from Issue 17
Rapt from the pagan fervors of
her native Sicily, Saint Lucy
shivers, burdened by the candle-
crown of Scandinavia: dyeing
the advent of her night’s suburban
snowdrifts, red-blue-green-red,
with aniline and mylar, plugged-in
festoons display the relics
of an Oriental awe, now shriveled
to mere mild anticipation of a
bloodless birthday — not the
nocturnal precipice (but I
am none, nor will my sun renew),
nadir and crossing place of all
solstitial hallows: frore
above the heart’s Antarctica,
the streamered auroral storms’
torn sanctities, the luminous,
consuming, affectless
despairs of outer space.