Maxwell Bodenheim

“ The steel-mill workers straggle down this street,
Clanging shut the doorways of their souls,
And the sound rips their lips open.
The steel-mill workers do not know of this:
They only seek something that will sweeten
The dirt that has eaten into their flesh
And change it to raw music. ”

“ Your head is steel cut into drooping lines
That make a mask satirically meek:
Your face is like a tired devil weak
From drinking many vague and unsought wines.
The sullen skepticism of your eyes
For ever trying to transcend itself,
Is often entered by a wistful elf
Who sits naïvely unperturbed and wise. ”

“ Stoop before the steel-mill gate
As though the morning’s ghastly murmur
Washed against them in a wave
Stiffening them into resisting curves.
One is old and floridly misshapen.
Years have melted out within her frame,
Flooding her with lukewarm loves. ”

“ As you stumble over the ties
Sunlight is clinging, yellow spit
Raining down upon your faces.
You are the living cuspidors of day.
Dirt, its teasing ghost, dust,
And passionless kicks of steel, fill you. ”

“ Where the night, a crazy child,
Dips herself in sallow rouge
And chases oaths and heavy mirth
And even human beings:
Where the smoky sadness of the steel-mills
Wanders hesitantly into death
And drops a ghostly blur upon this girl. ”

“ Scampering in and out of your long, green beards;
O trees, to whom sunlight is a tattered pilgrim
Counting his dreams within your hermitage
And slipping down the road, in twilight robes;
O trees, whose leaves make an incense of sound
Reeling with the beat of your caught feet,
Do not mingle your tips in startled hatred,
When little men come to fell you. ”

“ Motion without life,
And life that holds no motion!
[72] TO ORRICK JOHNS
The tread-mill roar that ever tramps between
The smirched geometries of this stern place,
Sweeps vainly on your drowsily reckless face
Lost in a swirl of raped loves barely seen. ”

“ Shines like sunlight groping through dense leaves,
Forgets his battered happiness
And bows with mock grace to his shouting day.
Beside him is a fellow-countryman
Walking aimless, dazed with joy of motion. ”

“ The hearts of these steel-striding men
Ascend and blend within their eyes, [76]
And yet, these men are unaware of this.
They only feel a fluid relief
Voicing, in a clustered roar,
The cries of struggling thoughts unshaped by words. ”

“ Strolling through your greys and blacks and browns!
No man bestows his orange robe
Soberly upon your uncoloured pavements,
Rebuking life for being death.
No woman taunts her sorrows
With a coloured haughtiness. ”

“ When too much pain has lowered
The eyelids of your mood,
A peaceful humour wraps your face.
You are like an old man
Watching children fly from his fingertips.
In your kirtle of borrowed skies
You find a sorrow luring your horizons
Into hesitating brightness....
When night remembers, you have straightened
Into stealthy, angry calmness
Fingering it first, unsent arrow.
[74] STEEL-MILLS: SOUTH CHICAGO
I
This red hush toppling over the sky,
Wanders one step toward the stars
And dies in a questioning shiver. ”

“ Are touched by evening dizziness, to dust,
And lose their fierce pretence of hardness.
Three crows in a row
Search for clearer tongues, with steady discords.
Man
The nervous dissolution
Which men call beauty stands
Sternly watching itself. ”

“ Some of the poems which compose this book have appeared in the Yale Review, the Smart Set, the New Republic, Reedy’s Mirror, the Dial, the Touchstone, the Little Review, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the Century, and the New York Tribune. They are good, in spite of their numerous appearances. ”