34
PARTISAN REVIEW
downmoving faded horses
.in motion of things past.
2.
The house leans lopsided on the grey moist walls
and in the basement the dust collects
on the soiled wash that waits in the laundry.
The four chinese close their black poppy eyes,
hold the hot irons to their cheeks
and forget to look out of the blurred window.
Each night
the house inters the hacking sound
as Mrs. Donatello in her damp bed
coughs on the bilge green walls.
each night
the black sinks deeper in her sockets
the bones emerge and lie lightly on the bed
each night
the walls creak at 4 A. M.
the cats prowl in the halls
the night sounds become the day's stridency
and in the morning Sr. Donatello turns over
and begets another child.
Gangrene rots slowly
and Mrs. Dante Pepe holds
in her blue veined fingers
the restless sheet, a white soiled
moth that stirs fretfully,
and complams her amputated leg hurts her.
Her blanched skeleton like ferns of twisted frost
waits restlessly the faint green odors
of a new carbolic spring.
3.
Cornelia,
that languorous, brown italian gem
lies as a street in dung heaps
