This is for you who are to come, with Time,
And gaze upon our ruins with strange eyes.
So, always, there were the streets and the high, clear light
And it was a crowded island and a great city;
They built high up in the air.
I have gone to the museum and seen the pictures.
And yet shall not know this body. It was other;
Though the first sight from the water was even so,
The huge blocks piled, the giants standing together,
Noble with plane and mass and the squareness of stone,
The buildings that had skeletons like a man
And nerves of wire in their bodies, the skyscrapers,
Standing their island, looking toward the sea.
But the maps and the models will not be the same.
They cannot restore that beauty, rapid and harsh,
That loneliness, that passion or that name.
Yet the films were taken?
Most carefully and well,
But the skin is not the life but over the life.
The live thing was a different beast, in its time,
And sometimes, in the fall, very fair, like a knife sharpened
On stone and sun and blue shadow. That was the time
When girls in red hats rode down the Avenue
On the tops of busses, their faces bright with the wind,
And the year began again with the first cool days.
All places in that country are fair in the fall.
You speak as if the year began with the fall.
It was so. It began then, not with the calendar.
It was an odd city. The fall brought us new life,
Though there was no festival set and we did not talk of it.
That seems to me strange.
It was not strange, in that city.
We had four seasons: the fall of the quick, brief steps
Ringing on stone and the thick crowds walking fast,
The clear sky, the rag of sunset beyond great buildings,
The bronze flower, the resurrection of the year.
The squirrels ran in the dry Park, burying nuts.
The boys came from far places with cardboard suitcases.
It is hard to describe, but the lights looked gay at night then
And everything old and used had been put away.
There were cheap new clothes for the clerks and the clerks' women.
There was frost in the blood and anything could begin.
The shops were slices of honeycomb full of honey,
Full of the new, glassed honey of the year.
It seemed a pity to die then, a great pity.
The great beast glittered like sea-water in the sun,
His heart beating, his lungs full of air and pride,
And the strong shadow cutting the golden towers.
Then the cold fell, and the winter, with grimy snow,
With the overcoatless men with the purple hands
Walking between two signboards in the street
And the sign on their backs said "Winter" and the soiled papers
Blew fretfully up and down and froze in the ice
As the lukewarm air blew up from the grated holes.
This lasted a long time, till the skin was dry
And the cheeks hot with the fever and the cough sharp.
On the cold days, the cops had faces like blue meat,
And then there was snow and pure snow and tons of snow
And the whole noise stopping, marvellously and slowly,
Till you could hear the shovels scraping the stone,
Scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch, like the digging of iron mice.
Nothing else but that sound, and the air most pure,
Most pure, most fragrant and most innocent,
,And, next day, the boys made dirty balls of the snow.
This season lasted so long we were weary of it.
We were very weary indeed when the spring came to us.
And it came.
I do not know how even yet, but there was a turning,
A change, a melting, a difference, a new smell
Though not that of any flower.
It came from both
Rivers, I think, or across them. It sneaked in
On a market truck, a girl in a yellow hat
With a pinched, live face and a bunch of ten-cent narcissus
And the sky was soft and it was easy to dream.
You could count the spring on your fingers, but it came.
Ah, brief it was in that city, but good for love!
The boys got their stick-bats out then, the youths and girls
Talked hoarsely under street lamps, late in the night.
And then it was tiger-summer and the first heat,
The first thunder, the first black pile of aching cloud,
The big warm drops of rain that spatter the dust
And the ripping cloth of lightning.
Those were the hot
Nights when the poor lay out on- the fire-escapes
And the child cried thinly and endlessly. Many streets
Woke very late in the night, then.
And barbarously the negro night bestrode
The city with great gold rings in his ears
And his strong body glistening with heat.
He had, I think, a phial in one hand
And from it took a syringe, dry as dust,
To dope tired bodies with uneasy sleep.
The backs of my hands are sweating with that sleep
And I have lain awake in the hot bed
And heard the fierce, brief storm bring the relief,
The little coolness, the water on the tongue,
The new wind from the river, dear as rain.
I have not studied the weather-reports intensively.
Should I do so?
You will not get it from weather-reports.
There was the drunkard's city and the milkman's,
The city of the starving and the fed,
The city of the night-nurse and the scrubbed wall.
All these locked into each other like sliding rings
And a man, in his time, might inhabit one of them
Or many, as his fate took him, but always, always,
There were the blocks of stone and the windows gazing
And the breath that did not stop. It was never quite still.
You could always hear some sound, though you forgot it,
And the sound entered the flesh and was part of it.
It was high but no one planned it to be so high.
They did not think, when they built so. They did not say,
"This will make life better, this is due to the god,
This will be good to live in." They said "Build!"
And dug steel into die rocks.
They were a race
Most nervous, energetic, swift and wasteful,
And maddened by the dry and beautiful light
Although not knowing their madness.
So they built
Not as men before but as demons under a whip
And the light was a whip and a sword and a spurning heel
And the light wore out their hearts and they died praising it.
And for money and the lack of it many died,
Leaping from windows or crushed by the big truck.
They shot themselves in washrooms because of money.
They were starved and died on the benches of subway-stations,
The old men, with the caved cheeks, yellow as lard,
The men with the terrible shoes and the open hands,
The eyeing and timid crowd about them gathered.
Yet it is not just to say money was all their god
Nor just to say that machine was all their god.
It is not just to say any one thing about them.
They built the thing very high, far over their heads.
Because of it, they gave up air, earth and stars.
Will you tell me about the people, if you please?
They are all gone, the workers on the high steel,
The best of their kind, cat-footed, walking on space,
The arcs of the red-hot rivet in the air;
They are gone with the empty, arrogant women of price,
The evening women, curried till their flesh shone;
With the big, pale baker, the flour in his creases,
Coming up to breathe from his hell on a summer night;
They are gone as if they were not.
The blue-chinned men of the hotel-lobbies are gone,
Though they sat like gods in their chairs;
Night-watchmen and cleaning-women and millionaires;
The maimed boy, clean and legless and always sitting
On his small, wheeled platform, by the feet of the crowd;
The sharp, sad newsmen, the hackers spinning their wheels;
The ardent, the shy, the brave;
The women who looked from mean windows, every day,
A pillow under their elbows, heavily staring;
They are gone, gone with the long cars and the short ones,
They have dropped as smoothly as coins through the slot of
Time,
Mrs. Rausmeyer is gone and Mrs. Costello
And the girl at Goldstein & Brady's who had the hair.
Their lipsticks have made no mark on the evening sky.
It is long ago this all was. It is all forgotten.
And yet, you lie uneasy in the grave.
I cannot well lie easy in the grave.
All cities are the loneliness of man
And this was very lonely, in its time
(Sea-haunted, river-emblemed, O the grey
Water at ends of streets and the boats hooting!
The unbelievable, new, bright, girl moon!),
Most cruel also, but I walked it young,
Loved in it and knew night and day in it.
There was the height and the light. It was like no other.
When the gods come, tell them we built this out of steel,
Though men use steel no more.
And tell the man who tries to dig this dust,
He will forget his joy before his loneliness.
