Almost everything in "Nights" is asleep except the man at its centre. The art deco apartment buildings "sleep in the still air," the rich towers are "sleeping buildings," and by the end the whole city is "somnolent." Against all this stillness, Orrin Schwab sets one unnamed "he" who moves "fast" and "like a bullet" and covers the city from top to bottom in a single night. The poem's central idea is that a city shows its true structure after dark: its age, its immigrant past, its gulf between rich and poor. It shows this most clearly to someone who is awake and moving through it.
The route is the argument. We start in Inwood, where "the streets are colored in yellow light" and the old buildings "reflected their age / onto the sidewalks." Then comes the highway and the downtown clubs, where "flashes / of wanton youth" spill from "dark exits" into a "backseat." The backseat suggests, though the poem never says so, that he may be driving other people around. Next is the bridge to Brooklyn and the "back neighborhoods lost off of / Flatbush." Then the "tenements where his great grandparents lived," and finally the "caverns of wealth" with their "jade and gilded antiques / cashmere and lynx and thick oriental rugs." Each stop is a different layer of the city. The poem passes from the old and quiet to the young and loud, then to family memory, and last to money.
The word "back" quietly holds this together: "backseat," "back alleys," "back neighborhoods," "backend of the great city." The repetition builds a sense of the city's hidden side, the parts the "metropole lying splendid across / the river" prefers not to look at. "Metropole" is a telling choice. It is a word of empire, and it makes Brooklyn a distant colony, "as far as the Kingdom of Laos." The comparison is playful and a little bitter. It measures a few miles of river in terms of cultural and economic distance. Later the wealthy apartments are stuffed with "jade" and "oriental rugs," as if the centre of the city keeps its spoils from distant places on display. The poem lets these details speak without comment, but the contrast is hard to miss. His great-grandparents' tenements and the lynx-and-cashmere caverns look at the same river.
Formally, the poem has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. Stanzas are uneven, and the long lines run into one another. This suits the subject, because the syntax has no brakes. The repeated "and fast he went" works like a driver pushing the accelerator, and the clauses pile up until it is hard to tell where one sentence ends. The grammar sometimes slips as well. In the third-from-last stanza, "the clubs now rupturing sleek skinned legs and black velvet coats / pushed him over" fuses two ideas into one, and it is unclear who or what does the pushing. The violent verb "rupturing" turns the clubs' closing time into something like a burst. The tenses wobble too. The first stanza drifts from the present ("are colored," "glistens") to the past ("deserted by the time he was there"). It reads as though the poem is describing many nights at once, which fits the plural title and the opening "some nights."
The imagery leans on light and colour. There is yellow streetlight, "neon shadows," and a river that "glistens" and later "sparkles under the city's lights." The phrase "neon shadows" is the most inventive of these. It joins artificial brightness with darkness, and it sums up a city that is never truly dark and never truly awake.
The ending is the poem's best moment. After all the speed, the last line stretches out and slows: "he rode over the bridge over midtown now silent in the / deep hours, the city was somnolent and the night listened." The repeated "over" gives a floating, gliding feel, and the final clause gives the night a pair of ears. After so much looking, the poem finishes on listening, as if the whole run had been a kind of confession and the night were the only audience.
The poem's significance is modest but real. It shows how a few unadorned images can map a whole city's inequalities without any speech-making. It also gives that map a human scale, one restless person and his family's memory moving across it.