Fifth Avenue. (New York) by Maxwell Bodenheim

/ Seasons bring nothing to this gulch / Save a harshly intimate anecdote / Scrawled, here and there, on paint and stone. / The houses shoulder each other / In a forced and passionless communion. / Their harassed angles rise / Like a violent picture-puzzle / Hiding a story that only ruins could reveal; / Their straight lines, robbed of power, / Meet in dwarfed rebellion. / Sometimes they stand like vastly flattened faces / Suffering ants to crawl / In and out of their gaping mouths. / Sometimes, in menial attitudes / They stand like Gothic platitudes / Slipshodly carved in dark brown stone. / Tarnished solemnities of death / Cast their transfigured hue on this avenue. / The cool and indiscriminate glare / Of sunlight seems to desecrate a tomb, / And the racing people seem / A stream of accidental shadows. / Hard noises strike one's face and make / It numb with momentary reality, / But the noiseless undertone returns / And they change to unreal jests / Made by death.