And then he went on, wiping his chin with four fingers and a thumb, screwing his eyes to a thin slit, and correcting himself:

“I take that back. Write it off as a loss. If the big arch of the sky were paper and the violet depths of the sea were ink, I could never live long enough to write the dreams of man and the dynamic drive of those dreams.

“Who and what is man? He is Atlas and Thor and Yankee Doodle, an eagle, a lion, a rooster, a bear that walks like a man, an elephant, a moon-face, David and Goliath, Paul Bunyan and the Flying Dutchman, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Christ, the Equator and the Arctic Poles, holding in one hand the Bank of England and the Roman Catholic Church, in the other the Red Army and the Standard Oil Company, holding in easy reach the dogs of war and the doves of peace, the tigers of wrath and the horses of instruction.

“Let me sell you my dreams. Take these dreams for whatever you want to pay me. You shall never be tired till the sea is tired. You shall never go weary till the land and the wind go weary. You will be hard as nails, soft as blue fog.

“Man is born with rainbows in his heart and you’ll never read him unless you consider rainbows. He is a trouble shooter with big promises. He trades the Oklahoma roan mustang for a tub in the sky with wings falling falling in Alaska. Hard as a rock his head is an egg and ponders ponders. He is a phantasmagoria of crimson dawns and what it takes to build his dreams.”

So the finish. He ceased from wiping his chin with four fingers and a thumb, ceased from screwing his eyes to a thin slit, ceased correcting himself.

Then he vanished. In a wreath of blue smoke from a panatella seegar he was gone, a scholar, a clown, and a dreambook seller who had said enough for one day.

Turning a corner he talked to himself about the dust of the knuckles of his great-grandfathers, how they once were hard as nails and could pick a vest-button with a bullet, and how his own little knuckles sometime would shiver into fine dust and how he wanted snowdrifts piled over him and the inscription:HERE NO ONE LIES BURIED.

The Windy City

1

The lean hands of wagon men

put out pointing fingers here,

picked this crossway, put it on a map,

set up their sawbucks, fixed their shotguns,

found a hitching place for the pony express,

made a hitching place for the iron horse,

the one-eyed horse with the fire-spit head,

found a homelike spot and said, “Make a home,”

saw this corner with a mesh of rails, shuttling

people, shunting cars, shaping the junk of

the earth to a new city.

The hands of men took hold and tugged

And the breaths of men went into the junk