Train above Pedestrians
Where moonlight angles
through the east-west streets,
down among the old
for America
tall buildings that changed
the streets of other
cities circulate
elevated trains
overhead shrieking
and drumming, lit by
explosions of sparks
that harm no one and
the shadowed persons
walking underneath
the erratic waves
not of the lake but
of noise move through fog
sieved by the steel mesh
of the supporting
structures or through rain
that rinses pavements
and the el platforms
or through new snow that
quiets corners, moods,
riveted careers.
Working for others
with hands, backs, machines,
men built hard towers
that part the high air,
women and men built,
cooked, cleaned, delivered,
typed and filed, carried
and delivered, priced
and sold. The river
and air were filthy.
In a hundred years
builders would migrate
north a mile but in
these modern times this
was all the downtown
that was. And circling
on a round-cornered
rectangle of tracks
run the trains, clockwise
and counter, veering
through or loop-the-loop
and out again. Why
even try to list
the kinds of places
men and women made
to make money? Not
enough of them, yet
too many. From slow
trains overhead some
passengers can still
see stone ornaments,
pilasters, lintels,
carved by grandfathers,
great uncles and gone
second cousins of
today—gargoyle heads
and curving leaves, like
memorials for
that which was built to
be torn down again
someday, for those who
got good wages out
of all this building
or were broken by
it, or both, yet whose
labor preserves a
record of labor,
imagination,
ambition, skill, greed,
folly, error, cost,
story, so that a
time before remains
present within the
bright careening now.
