Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
suspended mysteriously in the archway-FLESHY PILLOW, now
sharp, now diffuse-beyond and through all this, we see the distant
teats, hanging in the wind, blowing in the dawn wind, oh, therefore
she came down wonderfully, her last end forgotten, heavy teats
ready for milking, their fat nipples swollen with promise. They sway
in the wind, and something is indeed falling from them, yes, like
frozen milk: snow! snow is falling, falling from the big teats, snow
is swirling in the bitter wind, under the pale corrugated belly of the
wintry dawn, blowing out of the ANUS and the VAGINAL
CANAL, it is snowing on the city.
0 Lord, behold my affliction! A vast desolation, the city, the
afflicted city, far as the eye can see, stones heaped up to the end of
the earth, lying dead in the winter, dead in the storm, whose hands
could have raised up so much emptiness? the enemy hath magnified
himself. Yet decrescendo this, spreading his hand on her pleasant
things, diminuendo, the intervals blurred now by the grinding whine
of low-geared motors, for in spite of everything dim towers, rubytipped,
rise obstinately through the blowing snow, a multitude of
lamps blink red and green in fugal progressions down below,
chimneys puff out black inversions and raise a defiant clamor of
colliding steel, and the snow itself is swallowed up by a million dark
alleys, just as their fearful obscurities are obliterated by the blinding
snow.
Through the city, through the snow, under the gray belly of
metropolitan morning, walks a man, walks the shadow of a solitary
man, like the figure in pedestrian-crossing signs, a photogram of a
walking man, caught in an empty white triangle, a three-sided
barrenness, walking alone in a life-like parable of empty triads,
between a pair of dotted lines, defined as it were by his own purpose:
forever to walk between these lines, snow or no snow, taking his
risks-or rather, perhaps that is a pedestrian-crossing sign, blurred by
the blowing snow, and yes, the man is just this moment passing
under it, trammeling the imaginary channel, the dotted straight and
narrow, at right angles. There he is, huddled miserably against the
snow and wind and the early hour, shrinking miserably into his own
wraps, meeting the pedestrians, those shadows of men making their
dotted crossings, at right angles, meeting some head on as well,
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