Summer Night
Down South's singing: " Darkies,
Roll dem cotton bales ... "
" Tennessee's ketching de Memphis blues ... "
... And a moon on the Mississippi
Is as sheer love-mad
As a moon on Lake Michigan ...
Lincoln Park is silver-washed with lake ripples:
Every dark spot is a nest for two cool aching bodies ...
(I remember you, Chicago girl,
And the blue electric light on your blue eyes,
Kisses with the taste of soft coal smoke in them,
Gossip with railroad yards in the rear.)
Telephone bells, those rasping telephone bells,
Why are they ringing in the moonlight.
When folks should be loving and singing?
There are too many people in New York City:
There are miles of roofs all cluttered with legs and arms and faces:
There are chimney stacks all black in the moon like silver tarnished ...
I see a boy of five on a chimney-top
Nude against the moon
Urinating silver on the city ...
The moon smiles ...
A ferry boat carries yellow waters about her,
Pier bells clang ...
Beside a heap of pig-iron on the dock the 'longshoreman's daughter
Is honeying the captain's son ...
" Yes, " says the salesman, fresh from the Lackawanna Limited,
His hands on the steel of the ferry gates,
" Say what you want, there's nothing like her ...
Good old Girl ...
She's the skyline all right, all right ...
O that Golden Woolworth Tower!
Out of five and ten cent pieces he pulled a skyscraper
Biggest on Earth ...
De -mocracy, I tell yer ... "
They eat in the Childs' Restaurants at two in the morning:
Buckwheat cakes with corn syrup,
Mugs of coffee on marble slabs ...
In New Orleans, Deadwood, Key West and Council Bluffs,
In Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine,
A young woman has so multiplied her image
That while she sits in the flesh sipping a lemonade in Los Angeles,
The movie millions laugh and cry, watching her loveliness in rags in the Rockies ...
" Ain't Mary Pickford a darling? "
The Baltimore trolley cars go jammed with summer fluff and straw hats
Out to Electric City,
Blazing, booming, shrieking ...
And come back crowded down silent avenues ...
(Trolleys along the Alantic Coast,
Trolleys in the Alleghenies,
Trolleys making the loop in soot-soft Pittsburgh,
Trolleys in the dark streaking a flare through moon-lit countryside.)
Coney Island skims golden platters along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean ...
Ten young dolphin women sport in the heaving breakers,
They shriek and scatter as the lifeboat swings among them ...
Down beside the cottonfields
A line of shanties:
Mammy sings: " Deep River, "
With a dark child at her bosom ...
Pickaninny cries like white trash for the moon ...
The young Negroes are singing
Banjo-tunes ...
On door-steps in Denver
The white shimmering girls
Laugh lightly while the spick-and-span boys
Try to be men in love ...
Above the Grand Canyon of the Colorado,
A little out of St. Paul,
Not far from Cleveland,
In the swaying cushioned Pullmans under yellow bulbs
The porters are making up the berths ...
All the commercial American hotels
Have electric lights, individual bathrooms, valet service, and are fireproof skyscrapers ...
Conventions are breaking up their meetings in the ballrooms ...
Out in the streets the cars clash, the boys shout " extras " ...
Atlanta is sweltering to-night,
But Minneapolis is cool ...
New York is full of the sea, lazy warm and moon-drunk ...
It's odd to think that the hospitals, the almshouses, and the Morgues
Are crowded with wrecks and corpses ...
It's odd to think of suicides in hall bedrooms, or down by the dreaming sea, or along the Ohio ...
It's odd to think of an East-Side room in gas-light
And a greasy father with a grand passion
Tearing his hair like Othello because his daughter is ruined ...
Killing, thieving, quarrelling, hunger —
America is like a bloated body swelling with balked desire ...
The air grows hotter, the din louder,
Glasses are snapped, the wine spills over, the carrousel whirls,
The moon pours madness,
The moon has turned our brains, and the wild demon is loosed...
Yet where the garden
Glories over the rocks of the mountain,
Larkspur and rose look faded in the brilliant moon;
They die into the dew-touched air,
And in the quiet
Two lovers sigh, content ...
Their world, a circle of hills,
A moon, a bed, themselves ...
All night long the Pittsburgh foundries flare:
You can't turn off the furnaces, you can't put out the fires:
The United States with electric lights
Sparkles all night long ...
Roll dem cotton bales ... "
" Tennessee's ketching de Memphis blues ... "
... And a moon on the Mississippi
Is as sheer love-mad
As a moon on Lake Michigan ...
Lincoln Park is silver-washed with lake ripples:
Every dark spot is a nest for two cool aching bodies ...
(I remember you, Chicago girl,
And the blue electric light on your blue eyes,
Kisses with the taste of soft coal smoke in them,
Gossip with railroad yards in the rear.)
Telephone bells, those rasping telephone bells,
Why are they ringing in the moonlight.
When folks should be loving and singing?
There are too many people in New York City:
There are miles of roofs all cluttered with legs and arms and faces:
There are chimney stacks all black in the moon like silver tarnished ...
I see a boy of five on a chimney-top
Nude against the moon
Urinating silver on the city ...
The moon smiles ...
A ferry boat carries yellow waters about her,
Pier bells clang ...
Beside a heap of pig-iron on the dock the 'longshoreman's daughter
Is honeying the captain's son ...
" Yes, " says the salesman, fresh from the Lackawanna Limited,
His hands on the steel of the ferry gates,
" Say what you want, there's nothing like her ...
Good old Girl ...
She's the skyline all right, all right ...
O that Golden Woolworth Tower!
Out of five and ten cent pieces he pulled a skyscraper
Biggest on Earth ...
De -mocracy, I tell yer ... "
They eat in the Childs' Restaurants at two in the morning:
Buckwheat cakes with corn syrup,
Mugs of coffee on marble slabs ...
In New Orleans, Deadwood, Key West and Council Bluffs,
In Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine,
A young woman has so multiplied her image
That while she sits in the flesh sipping a lemonade in Los Angeles,
The movie millions laugh and cry, watching her loveliness in rags in the Rockies ...
" Ain't Mary Pickford a darling? "
The Baltimore trolley cars go jammed with summer fluff and straw hats
Out to Electric City,
Blazing, booming, shrieking ...
And come back crowded down silent avenues ...
(Trolleys along the Alantic Coast,
Trolleys in the Alleghenies,
Trolleys making the loop in soot-soft Pittsburgh,
Trolleys in the dark streaking a flare through moon-lit countryside.)
Coney Island skims golden platters along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean ...
Ten young dolphin women sport in the heaving breakers,
They shriek and scatter as the lifeboat swings among them ...
Down beside the cottonfields
A line of shanties:
Mammy sings: " Deep River, "
With a dark child at her bosom ...
Pickaninny cries like white trash for the moon ...
The young Negroes are singing
Banjo-tunes ...
On door-steps in Denver
The white shimmering girls
Laugh lightly while the spick-and-span boys
Try to be men in love ...
Above the Grand Canyon of the Colorado,
A little out of St. Paul,
Not far from Cleveland,
In the swaying cushioned Pullmans under yellow bulbs
The porters are making up the berths ...
All the commercial American hotels
Have electric lights, individual bathrooms, valet service, and are fireproof skyscrapers ...
Conventions are breaking up their meetings in the ballrooms ...
Out in the streets the cars clash, the boys shout " extras " ...
Atlanta is sweltering to-night,
But Minneapolis is cool ...
New York is full of the sea, lazy warm and moon-drunk ...
It's odd to think that the hospitals, the almshouses, and the Morgues
Are crowded with wrecks and corpses ...
It's odd to think of suicides in hall bedrooms, or down by the dreaming sea, or along the Ohio ...
It's odd to think of an East-Side room in gas-light
And a greasy father with a grand passion
Tearing his hair like Othello because his daughter is ruined ...
Killing, thieving, quarrelling, hunger —
America is like a bloated body swelling with balked desire ...
The air grows hotter, the din louder,
Glasses are snapped, the wine spills over, the carrousel whirls,
The moon pours madness,
The moon has turned our brains, and the wild demon is loosed...
Yet where the garden
Glories over the rocks of the mountain,
Larkspur and rose look faded in the brilliant moon;
They die into the dew-touched air,
And in the quiet
Two lovers sigh, content ...
Their world, a circle of hills,
A moon, a bed, themselves ...
All night long the Pittsburgh foundries flare:
You can't turn off the furnaces, you can't put out the fires:
The United States with electric lights
Sparkles all night long ...
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