Chicago, Pt. I

“ …a man in himself is a city… if imaginatively conceived- any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions.”

-William Carlos Williams

Chicago: Pt. I

This young man is not a city; he’s a dash of seeds in the wind,

a swaggerer, a gambler, a pearl-diver.

He is a boy brimming with promise,

he is in many ways his parent’s child still.

There are older men in the east

who sneer at the way he holds his hand out for rain.

They can smell it coming;

they are wise now, they have developed systems,

they have pulled hard to get where they are

-it’s not something every man can achieve,

and don’t you forget it.

They talk amongst themselves of the day they arrived,

how they discovered that green tussock, that willing field,

or the way some stumbled into a valley,

and how it was on fire with sunlight and willow dust

and crimson leaves and birdsong-

they had no clue it was there!

They dug fingers deep into the soil

to test its richness,

and drank the river water to taste if it was sweet and clean.

Then they spread out on the grass,

and eventually grew roots and broad shoulders,

and beards of smoke, which tumbled into the sky.

They take a long draw on their own history

and glance across the dazzling prairies at the boy,

plunging his bare feet into Lake Michigan,

where herons drag their eyes

over the black water for bream

that flash like arrows of mercury off into the reeds.

They see him a extend a bony arm out west,

it looks like a rail road,

but they can’t hear what he’s saying.

They strain an ear,

but are deafened by their own cacophony;

jets of steam scream from pipes,

an iron hammer finds its home,

a hundred times over.

Now a wind rushes through Illinois with the cold on its tail,

it rattles the red barns,

slashes at hay stacks,

chases fat clouds across the sky.

And perhaps it’s some cock-assuredness

of youth, or just plain naïvety,

but he doesn’t seem to notice

how the sails of ships flap in the docks like panicked gills,

or how the trees huddle in copses

to moan-

their leaves are nearly all stripped away now,

look how they litter the forest floor,

and the apples! The acorns!

Still, and despite themselves, the older cities are anxious

of how the boy handles his business.

News crosses the country in gossiping droves,

follows the geese honking

into the harbours of Boston,

the damp parks of New York, knee-deep

in Fall.

He has stockyards now, bristling acres of hogs,

he has trams, he has ice trains.

He is a scientist, he is an entrepreneur.

But he is still a young man, some mutter, he has not been tested.

Not like New York, when Cholera spread to the Five Points,

and infants turned cold in their cots.

No, nor like what happened in Boston, remember,

the year of no summer,

when crops were lost, and the farmers rolled out west?

But the boy grows every day,

his houses are mushrooms, his people land like spores

amongst the weeds and the communities of wildflowers,

and they are strong and muddy and red-faced and happy

because Chicago is becoming a man.

His heart is a thick nut of industry now-

fertilizer factories muck in for the fruit, for the good of the fields,

the snaking veins of canals pull in the barges

up from the south, barrels

full to busting with grain, and liquor, and Mississippi quarrel.

The ice trains grind through Iowa, slow as hearses

on their way to California,

and the Hog Butcher of the World wrings his bloody hands,

and ushers in the next squealing mob.

And there is a steady rhythm to the growth,

like the beat of Native drums.

It is in the soil, a dull pulse,

it is in the pounding routine of feet on the sidewalks,

and the clapping hands at christenings,

it vibrates through the rusty frames of ploughs at night,

embodying Black Hawk War skeletons in the grass,

propped up on their elbows to see the stars

one last time.

On nights like this the boy is exhausted from the month’s labours,

from the drought of summer and the cold

that digs its claws into October.

Men are up in their towers on the look-out for fires,

for their suppers and for their wives.

But from their posts they cannot see how keen the straw is,

or how that persisting wind has found a way in

through a hole a field mouse might have made

in a shed.

Only Chicago feels the spark, like a fleabite on his belly,

and he chokes at the thought of the bone-dry timbers,

of the people asleep in their beds.

He hears the chants of his parents, the Potawatomis

as if for the first time,

as they float out of the land and affect the moon

behind its pale cataract of cloud, so it looks eerily upon the graveyards,

and pools in the eyes of night animals.

They stir up the silt of prophesy and they scare him

when he has feared nothing before.

The elders said he would be tested,

said he would have to gather himself again from ash

before he can be called a man.

He will have to find a pith of resilience at his core,

before he can boast of his history,

establish his economy,

before he can be known in his country as Chicago, the city.