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.

Copyright Credit: Reginald Gibbons, “Train Above Pedestrians” from Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press, 2008).

Source: Poetry (June 2006)