Chicago’s Congo

Chicago is an overgrown woman

      wearing her skyscrapers

      like a necklace ...

Chicago’s blood is kaleidoscopic

Chicago’s heart has a hundred auricles

*       *       *

                                  From the Congo

Sing to me of a red warrior moon victorious in a Congo sky ... show me a round dollar moon in the ragged blue purse of Chicago’s heavens ... tell me of a hundred spoil laden blacks tramping home from the raid ... point me out a hundred brown men riding the elevated home on payday ... pick me the winners ... in Chicago? ... in the Congo?

Skyscraper pinnacles rip great holes in the rubber balloon bag of the sky ... do spears kill quicker than printed words? ... midnight lies and cobra fangs ... ask me if civilization produces new forms of biting and tearing and killing ... see three million whites and two hundred thousand blacks civilized in Chicago

                                  From the Congo

*       *       *

I’m a grownup man today Chicago

My bones are thick and stout

      (when I moved to new districts bombings

      couldn’t break them)

My flesh is smooth and firm

      (look—the wounds you give me heal quickly)

See how the muscles ripple under my night-black skin

My strength comes not from resting

You should be proud of me Chicago

I’ve got a lion’s heart and a six-shooter

I’ve got a fighter’s fist and five newspapers

I’ve got an eye for beauty and another for cash

Nothing you’ve got I can’t have

A song dashes its rhythms in, my face like April rain

My song is a song of steel and bamboo, of brick flats and reed huts, of steamboats and slim canoes, of murder trials and jackal packs, of con men and pythons

My tune I get from automobiles and lions roaring, from the rustle of banknotes in a teller’s window and the rustle of leaves in Transvaal trees

I ask you to find a better song, a louder song, a sweeter song—

Here’s something Wagner couldn’t do

State Street is a wide gray band across Chicago’s forehead

At night a white faced mother moon clothes Skyscrapers in gray silk

At night when clocks yawn and hours get lazy

At night when the jungle’s a symphony in grays ...

Oh mother moon, mother of earth, bringer of silver gifts

Bring a veil of stardust to wrap this Congo in

Bring a shawl of moonmist to clothe Chicago’s body

*       *       *

Between the covers of books lie the bones of yesterdays

Today is a new dollar

And

My city is money mad

*       *       *

Across the street from the Ebenezer Baptist Church,

      women with cast-iron faces peddle love

In the flat above William’s Funeral Home

      six couples sway to the St. Louis Blues

Two doors away from the South Side Bank

      three penny-brown men scorch their guts with four bit whiskey

Dr. Jackson buys a Lincoln

His neighbor buys second hand, shoes

      —the artist who paints this town must

      use a checkered canvas ...

Tired looking houses of brown stone

Ramshackle flats with sightless eyes

A surface car throws a handful of white sparks at cracked red bricks

An L train roars oaths at backyard clotheslines

Mornings on South Parkway flats sit like silent cats watching the little green mice of buses running up and down the boulevard

And only grass has heard the secrets of vacant lots

*       *       *

This song has no tune. You cannot hum it.

This song has no words. You cannot sing it.

This song everybody knows, nobody knows.

It is in a pattern of brown faces at the Wabash Y.M.C.A., a 35th Street gambling place, a Parkway theatre—you get it or you don’t

It is a melody of everything and nothing

I saw twelve stars sitting along the edge of a four story flat

I saw a moon held by leafless tree fingers

I heard a shot tear huge holes in the blanket of silence

Later—just a little later—the moon got away and the stars stepped back into the sky

There will always be new wordless songs, new humless tunes

Chicago sings these songs each day

Chicago who wears her skyscrapers like a necklace ...