TWO PORTRAITS
THE IMAGIST
You sit in pink kimono by a ninth floor hotel window smoking a cigar, and stare at the black open-work of a skyscraper in the making.
This way and that, on rigid lines of steel, run little tinkering men. Mechanical contraptions. Black tinkers hung in open boxes of black metal, black automatic tinkers striking a hollow sound above a mammoth void.
It might be a problem in geometry you ponder, with your look of pleased detachment. Decent of God to draw inhuman picture-patterns at your window under a bright blue sky, against a cool blue river. I like to see you smiling and smoking in your red arm-chair. Your eyes never cease their computing, and your ear detects the utmost polyphonics of New York.
TWO ARTISTS
One, made up as tradition wills, flowing black coat, curled mop of hair, benignant satisfaction, sits tall and bland upon a stool and darts aslant an audience two clever flitting eyes. The other, quiet, rotund soul is small and vexed and homeless to be viewed. He draws his bow and closes round, deep orbs upon these wraiths of New York streets, these rows of substance and content and devastation.
Pale lids that feel, pale Spanish brooding lids, they float before us in pure mist, evoked from sterile air. It is you, scorner of crowds, with the grave, sportive voice of your instrument, who drag us from our velvet seats and twist and twine and wrap us in your dream. It is you, sage of the closed, dreaming eyes, who steal us from our urban ways and lose us near the pallid clash of mountain waterfalls. And all the while a pair of perfect hands plays rippling chords of black and white, pours out Victorian rivulets to charm a New York audience.
