Big Money

The Camera Eye (45)

the narrow yellow room teems with talk under the low ceiling and crinkling tendrils of cigarettesmoke twine blue and fade round noses behind ears under the rims of women’s hats in arch looks changing arrangements of lips the toss of a bang the wise I-know-it wrinkles round the eyes all scrubbed stroked clipped scraped with the help of lipstick rouge shavingcream razorblades into a certain pattern that implies

this warmvoiced woman who moves back and forth with a throaty laugh head tossed a little back distributing with teasing looks the parts in the fiveoclock drama

every man his pigeonhole

the personality must be kept carefully adjusted over the face

to facilitate recognition she pins on each of us a badge

today entails tomorrow

Thank you but why me? Inhibited? Indeed goodby

the old brown hat flopped faithful on the chair beside the door successfully snatched

outside the clinking cocktail voices fade

even in this elderly brick dwellinghouse made over with green paint orange candles a little tinted calcimine into

Greenwich Village

the stairs go up and down

lead through a hallway ranked with bells names evoking lives tangles unclassified

into the rainy twoway street where cabs slither slushing footsteps plunk slant lights shimmer on the curve of a wet cheek a pair of freshcolored lips a weatherlined neck a gnarled grimed hand an old man’s bloodshot eye

street twoway to the corner of the roaring avenue where in the lilt of the rain and the din the four directions

(the salty in all of us ocean the protoplasm throbbing through cells growing dividing sprouting into the billion diverse not yet labeled not yet named

always they slip through the fingers

the changeable the multitudinous lives)

box dizzingly the compass