How to Enter a Big City

Thomas Merton

Swing by starwhite bones and

Lights tick in the middle.

Blue and white steel

Black and white

People hurrying along the wall.

”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“

Curve behind the sun again

Towers full of ice. Rich

Glass houses, “Here,

Have a little of my blood,”

Rich people!”

Wheat in towers. Meat on ice.

Cattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls.

Baseball between these sudden tracks.

Yell past the red street—

Have you any water to drink, city?

Rich glass buildings, give us milk!

Give us coffee! Give us rum!

There are huge clouds all over the sky.

river smells of gasoline.

Cars after cars after cars, and then

A little yellow street goes by without a murmur.

There came a man

(”Those are radios, that were his eyes“)

Who offered to sell us his bones.

Swing by starwhite buildings and

Lights come to life with a sound

Of bugs under the dead rib.

Miles of it. Still the same city.

Do you know where you are going?

Do you know whom you must meet?

Fortune, perhaps, or good news

Or the doctor, or the ladies

In the long bookstore,

The angry man in the milkbar

The drunkard under the clock.

Fortune, perhaps, or wonder

Or, perhaps, death.

In any case, our tracks

Are aimed at a working horizon.

The buildings, turning twice about the sun,

Settle in their respective positions.

Centered in its own incurable discontent, the City

Consents to be recognized.

III

Then people come out into the light of afternoon,

Covered all over with black powder,

And begin to attack one another with statements

Or to ignore one another with horror.

Customs have not changed.

Young men full of coffee and

Old women with medicine under their skin

Are all approaching death at twenty miles an hour.

Everywhere there is optimism without love

And pessimism without understanding,

They who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts

Cannot agree to be at peace

With their own images, shadowing them in windows

From store to store.

Until the lights come on with a swagger of frauds

And savage ferns,

The brown-eyed daughters of ravens,

Sing in the lucky doors

While night comes down the street like the millennium

Wrapping the houses in dark feathers

Soothing the town with a sign

Healing the strong wings of sunstroke.

Then the wind of an easy river wipes the flies

Off my Kentucky collarbone.

The claws of the treacherous stars

Renegade drums of wood

Endure the heavenward protest.

Their music heaves and hides.

rain and foam and oil

Make sabbaths for our wounds.

(Come, come, let all come home!)

The summer sighs, and runs.

My broken bird is under the whole town,

My cross is for the gypsies I am leaving

And there are real fountains under the floor.

Branches baptize our faces with silver

Where the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills.

Winds at last possess our empty country

There, there under the moon

In parabolas of milk and iron

The ghosts of historical men

(Figures of sorrow and dust)

Weep along the hills like turpentine.

And seas of flowering tobacco

Surround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.

782

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The country lies flat, expressionless as the face of a stranger.
Not one hillock shelters a buried bone. The city:
a scene thin as a theater backdrop, where no doors open,
no streets extend beyond the view from the corner.

Only the railroad embankment is high, shaggy with grass.
Only the freight, knuckling a red sun under its wheels,
drags familiar box-car shapes down long perspectives
of childhood meals and all crossings at sunset.