When,
worn out by papers,
numbers, cubicles and lawyers—
who (mal)practice the injustice
of underpaying their employees—
(liabilities rather than assets),
I have to breathe less noxious vapors
than those given off by these
nefarious employers
and lose myself among
a flow of people
and impatient cars
along Michigan avenue,
beneath a full-blown lunchtime sunlight
that burns away all of Chicago’s
ill-gotten revenue.
There,
across the street,
the crunch along a gravel path
my walk creates;
and through a web of Hawthorn
trees that might as well been
imported from Hades,
the Art Institute’s garden awaits,
where I behold the Lovely Ladies.
Once upon a time,
their bronze skins glowed
with beaux-arts pulchritude,
as joyful fountains flowed
freely from their hands.
Created by Lorado Taft, who
caught the soul’s solitude
as waves of humanity
gazed on by Father Time
crashed—like white horses
into the sea’s shifting sands.
From the balconies of high society,
to the hoi polloi, people
gathered under
1913’s ripening sunlight
to soak up the beauty of this art,
before the Federal Reserve
and World War I blew
our civilization apart.
They’re well built,
(like goddesses should be)
from a time that burned
with electric enthusiasm
and civil affections,
unlike the sarcasm
that flows like silt
through the veins
of today’s hipsters
after they’ve been spurned
by saboteurs
who think that Truth, Beauty
and Goodness
are nothing but words
that a drunken poet slurs.
They carry shells of water,
like their cosmic sister Aquarius,
in an oxidized tableau
of frozen poses;
and labor to bring us
relief from a stressful day
by drowning out the whine
of annoying bosses
with the music
of their watery spray.
5 Venuses emerge,
each from a broken shell…
They don’t mind standing out there
while Chicago’s carbonic breath from hell
scrapes another layer
of unsociable bile
from their diaphanous drapes.
These ladies don’t have a prayer
when it comes to
the slow patient abuse
of time
mixed with
Chicago’s brutal weather…
Day after night, month after year,
drenched in a cascade of drops,
which exhaust
themselves
in a shower of applause
that flows into the basin,
where I sit lost
in the enchanted adoration
of its liquid spell.
A flowing monotony
that pours day over day;
one blurring into another,
a song everyone understands
and nothing seems to change
but the numbers on the calendar,
and lines which spread—
like leaning shadows—
over my slowly wrinkling hands.
But then my gaze returns
to a pair of happy cherubs
who squeeze their fishes
so hard,
fountains gush
from their gaping mouths!
As the lunchtime crowd
busies itself with food,
books or phone,
I don’t mind the feeling
of being alone,
while the fountain washes away
this algae-like mood,
as its loud
chorus baptizes
another initiate
in its amphitheater
of watery healing.
As this ceremony comes to an end,
every second ticking on
my watch
tells me
it’s time to go back,
to my underworld across the street--
like Orpheus hoping that the music
of my pleasant personality
will soften the heart
of boss Hades;
for my reverie
to take a backseat
and put the shackles
of necessity
around my feet,
and pretend
it’s not a burden.
But
before I go
I take one last look
at the Lovely Ladies…
One of them reaches out
a green arm and beckons:
“Wait,
don’t go!
We want to share something
with you…
You are a drop of water
that fell
from an invisible cloud of consciousness.
See how they
take shape
for a moment
and
swiftly melt
along with millions
of other drops,
making up
an invisible sea
which is really eternity…
You’re just floating down the stream
of a dream, and to that ocean
one day
you will return…”
And the wave of that epiphany
stirs mysterious emoceans
within me.
As I walk away
the Ladies weep fountains
of bygone days,
like inmates in a nursing home
lost in a medicated haze,
an encrusting foam
that oxidizes their tarnished skins.
They weep
for refined manners--
culture, art, beauty;
and for what the world
has become, with its
wars of aggression,
electric enslavements
and civil suspicions.
In spite of everything,
the Ladies will endure;
eternal reminders of
all things pure,
while the flowing streams
of Truth, Beauty and Goodness,
drown me in their dreams…
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