poem thursday--Mina Loy

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