Over the tops of the houses
Twilight and sunset meet.
The green, diaphanous dusk
Sinks to the eager street.
Astray in the tangle of roofs
Wanders a wind of June.
The dial shines in the clock-tower
Like the face of a strange-scrawled moon.
The narrowing lines of the houses
Palely begin to gleam,
And the hurrying crowds fade softly
Like an army in a dream.
Above the vanishing faces
A phantom train flares on
With a voice that shakes the shadows, —
Diminishes, and is gone.
And I walk with the journeying throng
In such a solitude
As where a lonely ocean
Washes a lonely wood.
New York is one of the most poetically mapped cities on earth.