build the city again.

The city is a tool chest opened every day,

a time clock punched every morning,

a shop door, bunkers and overalls

counting every day.

The city is a balloon and a bubble plaything

shot to the sky every evening, whistled in

a ragtime jig down the sunset.

The city is made, forgotten, and made again,

trucks hauling it away haul it back

steered by drivers whistling ragtime

against the sunsets.

Every day the people get up and carry the city,

carry the bunkers and balloons of the city,

lift it and put it down.

“I will die as many times

as you make me over again,

says the city to the people,

I am the woman, the home, the family,

I get breakfast and pay the rent;

I telephone the doctor, the milkman, the undertaker;

I fix the streets

for your first and your last ride—

Come clean with me, come clean or dirty,

I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers;

I remember all you forget.

I will die as many times

as you make me over again.”

Under the foundations,

Over the roofs,

The bevels and the blueprints talk it over.

The wind of the lake shore waits and wanders.

The heave of the shore wind hunches the sand piles.

The winkers of the morning stars count out cities

And forget the numbers.

7

At the white clock-tower

lighted in night purples

over the boulevard link bridge

only the blind get by without acknowledgments.

The passers-by, factory punch-clock numbers,

hotel girls out for the air, teameoes,

coal passers, taxi drivers, window washers,

paperhangers, floorwalkers, bill collectors,

burglar alarm salesmen, massage students,

manicure girls, chiropodists, bath rubbers,

booze runners, hat cleaners, armhole basters,

delicatessen clerks, shovel stiffs, work plugs—

They all pass over the bridge, they all look up

at the white clock-tower

lighted in night purples

over the boulevard link bridge—

And sometimes one says, “Well, we hand it to ’em.”

Mention proud things, catalogue them.

The jack-knife bridge opening, the ore boats,

the wheat barges passing through.

Three overland trains arriving the same hour,

one from Memphis and the cotton belt,

one from Omaha and the corn belt,

one from Duluth, the lumberjack and the iron range.

Mention a carload of shorthorns taken off the valleys of Wyoming last week, arriving yesterday, knocked in the head, stripped, quartered, hung in ice boxes today, mention the daily melodrama of this humdrum, rhythms of heads, hides, heels, hoofs hung up.

8

It is wisdom to think the people are the city.

It is wisdom to think the city would fall to pieces

and die and be dust in the wind.

If the people of the city all move away and leave no people at all to watch and keep the city.

It is wisdom to think no city stood here at all until the working men, the laughing men, came.

It is wisdom to think tomorrow new working men, new laughing men, may come and put up a new city—