Train above Pedestrians

Where moonlight angles through the east-west streets, down among the old for America tall buildings that changed the streets of other cities circulate elevated trains overhead shrieking and drumming, lit by explosions of sparks that harm no one and the shadowed persons walking underneath the erratic waves not of the lake but of noise move through fog sieved by the steel mesh of the supporting structures or through rain that rinses pavements and the el platforms or through new snow that quiets corners, moods, riveted careers. Working for others with hands, backs, machines, men built hard towers that part the high air, women and men built, cooked, cleaned, delivered, typed and filed, carried and delivered, priced and sold. The river and air were filthy. In a hundred years builders would migrate north a mile but in these modern times this was all the downtown that was. And circling on a round-cornered rectangle of tracks run the trains, clockwise and counter, veering through or loop-the-loop and out again. Why even try to list the kinds of places men and women made to make money? Not enough of them, yet too many. From slow trains overhead some passengers can still see stone ornaments, pilasters, lintels, carved by grandfathers, great uncles and gone second cousins of today—gargoyle heads and curving leaves, like memorials for that which was built to be torn down again someday, for those who got good wages out of all this building or were broken by it, or both, yet whose labor preserves a record of labor, imagination, ambition, skill, greed, folly, error, cost, story, so that a time before remains present within the bright careening now.