text: Twelve o'clock.
  Along the reaches of the street
  Held in a lunar synthesis,
  Whispering lunar incantations
  Dissolve the floors of memory
  And all its clear relations,
  Its divisions and precisions,
  Every street lamp that I pass
  Beats like a fatalistic drum,
  And through the spaces of the dark
  Midnight shakes the memory
  As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
  
  Half-past one,
  The street lamp sputtered,
  The street lamp muttered,
  The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
  Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
  Which opens on her like a grin.
  You see the border of her dress
  Is torn and stained with sand,
  And you see the corner of her eye
  Twists like a crooked pin."
  
  The memory throws up high and dry
  A crowd of twisted things;
  A twisted branch upon the beach
  Eaten smooth, and polished
  As if the world gave up
  The secret of its skeleton,
  Stiff and white.
  A broken spring in a factory yard,
  Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
  Hard and curled and ready to snap.
  
  Half-past two,
  The street lamp said,
  "Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
  Slips out its tongue
  And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
  So the hand of a child, automatic,
  Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
  I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
  I have seen eyes in the street
  Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
  And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
  An old crab with barnacles on his back,
  Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
  
  Half-past three,
  The lamp sputtered,
  The lamp muttered in the dark.
  
  The lamp hummed:
  "Regard the moon,
  La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
  She winks a feeble eye,
  She smiles into corners.
  She smoothes the hair of the grass.
  The moon has lost her memory.
  A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
  Her hand twists a paper rose,
  That smells of dust and old Cologne,
  She is alone
  With all the old nocturnal smells
  That cross and cross across her brain."
  The reminiscence comes
  Of sunless dry geraniums
  And dust in crevices,
  Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
  And female smells in shuttered rooms,
  And cigarettes in corridors
  And cocktail smells in bars."
  
  The lamp said,
  "Four o'clock,
  Here is the number on the door.
  Memory!
  You have the key,
  The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
  Mount.
  The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
  Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."
  
  The last twist of the knife.