Chicago Poem

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could

meet the middle western day with anything approaching

Dignity. It’s a place that lets you

understand why the Bible is the way it is:

Proud people cannot live here.

The land’s too flat. Ugly sullen and big it

pounds men down past humbleness. They

Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and

terrible sky. In country like this there

Can be no God but Jahweh.

In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago

passes its natural gas in flames

Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high.

The stench stabs at your eyeballs.

The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton

steel of a bombed-out town.

Remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men

doing strong things in

Showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light

and the furnace door opening with a

Blast of orange like a sunset? Or an orange?

It was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or

a Nazi who wished there were people

Behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers,

whose old man spent most of his life in there,

Remembers a “nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into the

black sand.”

It was 5 years until I could afford to recognize the ferocity.

Friends helped me. Then I put some

Love into my house. Finally I found some quiet lakes

and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant.

Standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go

absolutely flat. Smaller than raindrops, and only

Here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible a hundred

yards away — and the Blue Gill caught that afternoon

Lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! Jewel at its ear

Belly gold so bright you’d swear he had a

Light in there. His color faded with his life. A small

green fish . . .

All things considered, it’s a gentle and undemanding

planet, even here. Far gentler

Here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is

always and only with what we build on top of it.

There’s nobody else to blame. You can’t fix it and you

can’t make it go away. It does no good appealing

To some ill-invented Thunderer

Brooding above some unimaginable crag . . .

It’s ours. Right down to the last small hinge it

all depends for its existence

Only and utterly upon our sufferance.

Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I

knew again that never will the

Man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparalleled

monstrocity. It

Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a

blind, red, rhinoceros.

It’s already running us down.

You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.

I don’t know what you’re going to do about it,

But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just

going to walk away from it. Maybe

A small part of it will die if I’m not around

feeding it anymore.

Source: Ring of Bone: Collected Poems of Lew Welch (City Lights Books, 2012)