The City's Heart

Where will we find the city's heart?
It's in the faces of the men that gamble and are gone,
Grey-faced like shadows they whisper sexual secrets,
Hands fumbling in pockets, lips loose with drink.
Speaking of nothing but collective and commonplace sorrow-
Felt by fat-armed mammas in brothels and hotels,
Eyes unbearably dark, bodies laden with tribulation,
Bodies upheld by a feverish, anxious love,
A string that sometimes twines thick,
And sometimes wears away to taut thinness,
And then, in long oppressive evenings,
Becomes as fragile as a spider's web... and yet as strong,
Enough to support the kindly hand of death, and not to break.
Behind windows of the city, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out,
And brooding faces are sometimes seen, biting lips, preoccupied
In the great windy gusts of life, in the nameless spaces of solitude.
But o heroic thought, that batters the brainpans of man,
And coaxes him delightfully from love to pain,
To sink and rise and sink again,
Like a pinball in a mad machine...
My heart goes out to nothingness but only finds echoes in things,
And thus the city's heart responds, in ready words of love and cheer,
That you can read, if you are able, in the blank blaze of bars,
In the eyes of strange girls, in the frsh-lipped faces of friends,
Behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses,
Like new forms seen in a joyful dream.