Written by
Carl Sandburg |
I WAITED today for a freight train to pass.
Cattle cars with steers butting their horns against the
bars, went by.
And a half a dozen hoboes stood on bumpers between
cars.
Well, the cattle are respectable, I thought.
Every steer has its transportation paid for by the farmer
sending it to market,
While the hoboes are law-breakers in riding a railroad
train without a ticket.
It reminded me of ten days I spent in the Allegheny
County jail in Pittsburgh.
I got ten days even though I was a veteran of the
Spanish-American war.
Cooped in the same cell with me was an old man, a
bricklayer and a booze-fighter.
But it just happened he, too, was a veteran soldier, and
he had fought to preserve the Union and free the
niggers.
We were three in all, the other being a Lithuanian who
got drunk on pay day at the steel works and got to
fighting a policeman;
All the clothes he had was a shirt, pants and shoes--
somebody got his hat and coat and what money he
had left over when he got drunk.
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Written by
Jack Gilbert |
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows.
By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage.
Love is not
enough.
We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time.
We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.
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Written by
David Lehman |
The last Campbell's tomato soup can
of the twentieth century is going to
the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh
That is an example of a sentence
Another is this from a CEO in Fortune
"You die in either case, but this way you get
to do it proactively," where the adverb
makes the sentence I'm walking amid
the tourists on Bleecker Street the riffraff
the students with backpacks the bums and
a good old-fashioned New York feeling
hits me from head to toe a misanthropic snarl
the urge to kick a stranger in the pants,
and if you don't smoke you feel as if you do
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Written by
Jack Gilbert |
The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach.
Comes to the heart
and hesitates.
Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me.
The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers.
The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were
stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth.
Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength.
Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges.
Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood.
Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh.
Winter month after month telling
of death.
The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart.
Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont.
On Greek islands
with their fields of stone.
In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness.
Now the fox will live in our ruined
house.
My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water.
In this happy place my serious heart has made.
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