Morning is on its way in this poem before anyone says so. "speech has chinks in its wall of sound" is the opening line, and the image is slightly off. A chink is a small gap in a wall, and we expect to see through it. The speaker hears instead: "through them I hear the Pleiades / blink off for the night." A star cluster goes out, and the speaker catches it with the ears. The senses seem to have swapped places, as they do in the small hours. "Wall of sound" is a phrase usually applied to dense, layered music, and it suits a room of overlapping voices. The speaker listens for the cracks in that noise, and the sky comes through them.
The next line drops from the cosmic to the plain: "it's called 'after hours'." The quotation marks keep the phrase at arm's length, as if the speaker were repeating a name someone else gave the time. Nothing in the poem says what kind of place this is. The title, "Angel Shakes at Lucky's," suggests a bar or club, but that is an inference. The angel never appears in the body of the poem, only a name and a mood.
From here the poem is built almost entirely from construction words. There are "lean buildings," "fresh and legible paint," something that "hoist[s]," and men "poised in relief." The grammar of "fresh and legible paint slips hoist" is hard to settle. "Slips" could be a noun or a verb, and "hoist" could mean raising a sign or raising a glass. The poem lets both readings stand, which matches the blur of the hour. "In relief" also works two ways. In sculpture, a relief is a figure that stands out from a flat surface. In ordinary speech, relief is what people feel when the night's work or the night's talk is over. The men are both carved figures and tired people.
Then the syntax breaks off. "and men are poised in relief / against." The sentence ends on a preposition with nothing to lean on. The poem has been looking for a background to set these figures against, and it stops short of one. The next fragment, "Lucky Arch's, / a proposed monument to that sound," moves on. The name has shifted from "Lucky's" in the title to "Lucky Arch's," as if the place were being turned into a landmark. The word "arch" adds an architectural note, and it also means sly or knowing, which fits the poem's tone. It may faintly recall the arches of a fast-food sign, though that is only a guess.
The sound patterns are quiet and unplanned. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short and clipped, with strings of stressed single syllables: "lean buildings stand." But the poem is stitched together by echoes. "Chinks" in line one returns as "blink" in line three. "Hoist" and "poised" share a vowel that sits oddly among the lowercase, matter-of-fact words around them. "Sound" ends both the first line and the last, so the poem closes where it began. The wall of sound that opens the poem becomes the thing the last line proposes to honor.
That closing gesture is what the poem is really about. Speech is ephemeral, a noise that thins out at dawn. It is also treated as a structure, a wall with gaps in it. The speaker moves from listening through that wall to imagining a monument to it, which is a way of keeping something that cannot be kept. The word "proposed" matters, because the monument does not exist. The poem itself is the nearest thing to it, a small construction of nine lines.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses to tell a story. It gives no plot, no named speaker, and no explanation of who the men are. Instead it lets language behave like the thing it describes. Sentences get cut off, words carry two meanings, and the senses cross. The poem shows how a stretch of late-night talk can feel solid and leaky at once, and how a bar, a street, and a sky can blur together at the point where the night gives way.