Lunch-Time Along Broadway

Twelve-thirty bells from a thousand clocks, the typewriter tacks and stops, Gorged elevators slam and fall through the floors like waterdrops, From offices hung like sea-gulls’ nests on a cliff the whirlwinds beat, The octopus-crowd comes rolling out, his tentacles crawl for meat.

He snuffles his way by restaurants where lily-voiced women feast, He pokes his muzzle through white-tiled caves, and gulps like a hungry beast, He roots into subterranean holes, he sweeps hell’s tables bare, His suckers settle and fix and drink like wasps on a bursting pear.

The wildcat quarrel of traffic soothes to a smooth rolling of tires And the waterflow sound of the feeding brute as he pads by the cooking-fires, His body shoulders the canyoned streets, his gluttonous mouths expand And he laps the fat and flesh of the earth as a cat laps milk from a hand.

Slowly the greedy claws curl back, the feelers recoil and close, The flood is setting the other way with the avalanche pound of snows, Heavy and hot as a sated bee, enormous, slower than oil, The beast comes shuffling to lair again, his lips still wet with his spoil.