Advice: A Book of Poems

<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</SPAN></span> <h2 class="nobreak">FIFTH AVENUE<br/> (<span class="smcap">New York</span>)</h2> <div class="poetry-container"> <div class="poetry"> <div class="verse">Seasons bring nothing to this gulch</div> <div class="verse">Save a harshly intimate anecdote</div> <div class="verse">Scrawled, here and there, on paint and stone.</div> <div class="verse">The houses shoulder each other</div> <div class="verse">In a forced and passionless communion.</div> <div class="verse">Their harassed angles rise</div> <div class="verse">Like a violent picture-puzzle</div> <div class="verse">Hiding a story that only ruins could reveal;</div> <div class="verse">Their straight lines, robbed of power,</div> <div class="verse">Meet in dwarfed rebellion.</div> <div class="verse">Sometimes they stand like vastly flattened faces</div> <div class="verse">Suffering ants to crawl</div> <div class="verse">In and out of their gaping mouths.</div> <div class="verse">Sometimes, in menial attitudes</div> <div class="verse">They stand like Gothic platitudes</div> <div class="verse">Slipshodly carved in dark brown stone.</div> <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</SPAN></span> <div class="verse">Tarnished solemnities of death</div> <div class="verse">Cast their transfigured hue on this avenue.</div> <div class="verse">The cool and indiscriminate glare</div> <div class="verse">Of sunlight seems to desecrate a tomb,</div> <div class="verse">And the racing people seem</div> <div class="verse">A stream of accidental shadows.</div> <div class="verse">Hard noises strike one&#8217;s face and make</div> <div class="verse">It numb with momentary reality,</div> <div class="verse">But the noiseless undertone returns</div> <div class="verse">And they change to unreal jests</div> <div class="verse">Made by death.</div> </div></div> <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />