Thin snow, and the first small pools of dusk

Start to swell from the low places of the park,

The swathe of walks, rises and plantings seeming

As it turns gray to enlarge—as if tidal,

A turbulent inlet or canal that reaches to divide

Slow dual processionals of carlights on the street,

The rare vague beacon of a bar or a store.

Shapes of brick, soiled and wet, yaw in the blur.

Elder, sullen, the small mythical folk

Gather in the scraps of dark like emigrants on a deck,

Immobile in their boots of fur and absurd finery.

They are old, old; though they stand with a straight elegance,

Their hair flutters dead-white, they have withered skin.

Between a high collar and an antic brim

The face is collapsed, or beaked like a baby bird’s.

To them, our most ancient decayed hope

Is a gross, infantile greed—the city itself,

Shoreline muffled in forgotten need and grief,

To us cold as a stone Venus in the snow, for them

Shows the ham-fisted persistence of the new-born,

Hemming them to the dim shadows of cornice and porch,

Small darknesses of fence-weeds and streetside brush:

We make them feel mean, it has worn them out,

Watching us; they stir only randomly to mete

Some petty stroke of revenge—arbitrary, unjust,

Striking our old, ailing or oppressed

Oftener than not. An old woman in galoshes

Plods from a bus, head bent in the snow, and falls,

Bruising her hip, her bag spilled in the wet.

The Old Ones watch with small grave faces, nearly polite:

As if one of them willed a dry sour joke, a kind of pun—

A small cruel fall, lost in a greater one.

It means nothing, no more than as if to tease her

They had soured her cow’s milk, or the cat spilled a pitcher,

Costing her an hour’s pleasure weeding in the heat,

Grunting among the neat furrows and mounds.

In the cold, she moans a little, stoops

To collect her things. Less likely, they might

Put the fritz on the complex machines in the tower

Of offices where she works—jam an elevator

Between floors, giving stranded bosses and workers a break,

Panicking some of them, and insignificant leak

Or let in some exquisite operation bobbing

In the vast, childlike play of movement

That sends cars hissing by them in the night:

The dim city whose heedless, cloudless heart

Tries them, apes them, the filmy-looking harbor

Hard in a cold pale storm that falls all over.