Come across, kick in, loosen up.

Where do you get that chatter?”

“Beat up the short-change artists.

They never did nothin’ for you.

How do you get that way?

Tell me and I’ll tell the world.

I’ll say so, I’ll say it is.”

“You’re trying to crab my act.

You poor fish, you mackerel,

You ain’t got the sense God

Gave an oyster—it’s raining—

What you want is an umbrella.”

“Hush baby—

I don’t know a thing.

I don’t know a thing.

Hush baby.”

“Hush baby,

It ain’t how old you are,

It’s how old you look.

It ain’t what you got,

It’s what you can get away with.”

“Bring home the bacon.

Put it over, shoot it across.

Send ’em to the cleaners.

What we want is results, re-sults

And damn the consequences.

Sh . . . sh. . . .

You can fix anything

If you got the right fixers.”

“Kid each other, you cheap skates.

Tell each other you’re all to the mustard—

You’re the gravy.”

“Tell ’em, honey.

Ain’t it the truth, sweetheart?

Watch your step.

You said it.

You said a mouthful.

We’re all a lot of damn fourflushers.”

“Hush baby!

Shoot it,

Shoot it all!

Coo coo, coo coo”—

This is one song of Chicago.

4

It is easy to come here a stranger and show the whole works, write a book, fix it all up—it is easy to come and go away a muddle-headed pig, a bum and a bag of wind.

Go to it and remember this city fished from its

depths a text: “independent as a hog on ice.”

Venice is a dream of soft waters, Vienna and Bagdad recollections of dark spears and wild turbans; Paris is a thought in Monet gray on scabbards, fabrics, façades; London is a fact in a fog filled with the moaning of transatlantic whistles; Berlin sits amid white scrubbed quadrangles and torn arithmetics and testaments; Moscow brandishes a flag and repeats a dance figure of a man who walks like a bear.

Chicago fished from its depths a text: Independent

as a hog on ice.

5

Forgive us if the monotonous houses go mile on mile

Along monotonous streets out to the prairies—

If the faces of the houses mumble hard words

At the streets—and the street voices only say:

“Dust and a bitter wind shall come.”

Forgive us if the lumber porches and doorsteps

Snarl at each other—

And the brick chimneys cough in a close-up of

Each other’s faces—

And the ramshackle stairways watch each other

As thieves watch—

And dooryard lilacs near a malleable iron works

Long ago languished

In a short whispering purple.

And if the alley ash cans

Tell the garbage-wagon drivers

The children play the alley is Heaven

And the streets of Heaven shine

With a grand dazzle of stones of gold

And there are no policemen in Heaven—

Let the rag-tags have it their way.

And if the geraniums

In the tin cans of the window sills