On Third Avenue
1
"You should have disappeared years ago"--
so disappear
on Third Avenue
to share the headless incognito
of shuffling shadow-bodies
animate with frustration
whose silence' only potence is
respiration
preceding the eroded bronze contours
of their other aromas
through the monstrous air
of this red-lit thoroughfare.
Here and there
saturnine
neon-signs
set afire
a feature
on their hueless overcast
of downcast countenances.
for their ornateness
Time, the contortive tailor,
on and off,
clowned with sweat-sculptured cloth
to press
upon these irreparable dummies
an eerie undress
of mummies
half unwound.
2
Such are the compensations of poverty,
to see---
Like an electric fungus
sprung from its own effulgence
if intercircled jewellery
reflected on the pavement,
like a reliquary sedan-chair,
out of a legend, dumped there,
before a ten-cent Cinema,
a sugar-coated box-office
enjail a goddess
aglitter, in her runt of a tower,
with ritual claustrophobia.
Such are compensations of poverty,
to see---
Transient in the dust,
the brilliancy
of a trolley
loaded with luminous busts;
lovely in anonymity
they vanish
with the mirage
of their passage.
-----from Compensations of Poverty [poems 1942-1959,]
in The Lost Lunar Baedeker Poems (1996)
selected & edited by Roger L. Conover
Mina Loy
at poets.org
at wikipedia
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