Chicago
“City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked”
************Carl Sandburg
*
In Chicago, we will press buttons to speak of love,
ride mechanic birds into the spring green,
pick bellis perennis from billboards,
and lay out a culture of desolation
below a railway station
Heading south from 7th Street,
I know there is an equation hidden in your hair
a taxi stole God’s starlight
spread both arms to breathe aromatic mathematics
When all the beauty of autumn is electrolyzed,
kerosene and your debauchery in a tight deadlock,
my heart will be reduced to
an elegy inside a blast furnace
Sometimes at dusk,
timid angels beat their wings, hanging back,
but their tender hands are finally snapped off
by electric cables between smokestack and smokestack
It is as if I were far from China’s hibiscus flowers,
whistling alone and fixing my tie,
while thinking that in my old hometown
there should be a fox upon the grassy slope
So you became mine that night,
like a dizzy butterfly astray among cinders
Yes, in Chicago,
only butterflies are not made of steel
And as the steam engine lets out
its pathetic wolf whistle,
whose velvet shawl
lying under the man-made pine tree in the garden
has salvaged this coarse, this illiterate city…
In Chicago, we will press buttons to write poems,
ride mechanic birds to watch clouds, mow oats from billboards,
yet want to lay out a laughable culture
below the railway station
that has attained desolation
(December 16, 1958)