Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen. Страница 116

               Breakfast Cereal Manufacturer.

Dillinger’s eyes and Melvin Purvis’—

               Dillinger grim, Purvis self-satisfied,

               Both died of bullets.

Football field, suburb streets, gray-sheeted clouds

      stretched out to the City ahead

          Myriad pylons, telegraph poles, a lavender boiler.

      Fulbright broadcast attacks war money

          Crushed stone mounds, earth eaten

          Henry Crown’s & General Dynamics’

               dust rising from rubble

      Sawdust burners

          topped by black cloud—

               sulphurous yellow

          gas rising from red smokestacks

      Power stations netted

               with aluminum ladders and ceramic balls

          rusty scrapheaps’ cranes

               stub chimneys puffing gray air

      Coalbarges’ old Holland dusk in a canal,

               railroad tracks banded to the city

          watertowers’ high legs walking the horizon

      The Chinese Foreign Minister makes his pronouncement,

Thicker thicker metal

               lone bird above phonepole

Thicker thicker smokestack wires

      Giant Aztec factories, red brick towers

               feeder-noses drooped to railyard

          “All human military activity” suspended

                              says radio—

      Campbell’s soups a fortress here,

          giant can raised high over Chicago

                    forest of bridge signs

               Church spires lifted gray

                    hazy towers downtown

      a belfried cross beneath

               dynamo’d smoke-cathedrals,

The train rolls slower

      past cement trucks’

               old cabs resting in produce flats

      over city streets, rumbling

      on a canal’s green mirror

               past the blue paint factory,

Thicker thicker the wires

      over cast iron buildings, black windows

local bus passing viaduct stanchions

a lone wino staggers down Industrial Thruway

This nation at war

               sun yellowing gray clouds,

               beast trucks down the

                         Garage’s bowels—

      Bright steam

          muscular puffing from an old slue

      Meadowgold Butter besmeared with coal dust,

          creosote wood bulwarks

Oiltank cars wait their old engine

      tracks curve into the city’s heart

          windowed hulks downtown

      where YMCA beckons the homeless unloved,

the groan of iron tons inching against

               whitened rail,

          giant train so slowly moved

               a man can touch the wheels.

II

Bus outbound from Chicago Greyhound basement

          green neon beneath streets Route 94

          Giant fire’s orange tongues & black smoke

                    pouring out that roof,

               little gay pie truck passing the wall—

               Brick & trees E. London, antique attics

                         mixed with smokestacks

      Apartments apartments square windows set like Moscow

      apartments red brick for multimillion population

               out where industries raise craned necks

      Gas station lights, old old old old traveler

               “put a tiger in yr tank—”

          Fulbright sang on the Senate floor

          Against the President’s Asian War

               Chicago’s acrid fumes in the bus

                         A-1 Outdoor Theatre

               ’gainst horned factory horizon,

               tender steeples ringing Metropolis

          Thicker thicker, factories

               crowd iron cancer on the city’s throat—

                    Aethereal roses

                              distant gas flares

                    twin flue burning at horizon

          Night falling on the bus

                              steady ear roar

                    between Chicago and New York

Wanderer, whither next?

      See Palenque dream again,

          long hair in America,

          cut it for Tehuantepec—

               Peter’s golden locks grown gray,

               quiet meditation in Oaxaca’s

                         old backyard,

          Tonala or Angel Port warm nights