Margaret Danner

It is New Year’s day.
The blasé people rise.
They face a sleet-like ray
Of light. The low slung skies
Send shadows down. It’s dark.

The earth is treacherous to the tread.
And deep in the upstairs bedroom
Of his terraced suite in Lincoln Park

The landlady tendered me notice today—me
after twenty-one years treading these upper floors.
Her reason? With folks so flocking this waterway-to-be
no one couple needs seven rooms; and then, too,

there are neighbors who think she is housing the hub
of a Communist wheel—I was hostess to whites
here for the holidays—and she fears a snub
from the neighborhood club.

When in nineteen-thirty-seven, Etta Moten, sweetheart
of our Art Study group, kept her promise, as if clocked,
to honor my house at our first annual tea, my pride

tipped sky, but when she, Parisian-poised and as smart
as a chrome-toned page from Harper’s Bazaar, gave my shocked
guests this hideous African nude, I could have cried.

And for many subsequent suns, we, who had placed apart
this hour to proclaim our plunge into modern art, mocked

Not really the elevator man at Newberry Library I am reminded, by the tan man who wings the elevator
of Rococo art. His ways

The Painted Lady is a small African
Butterfly gayly toned deep tan and peach
That seems as tremulous and delicately sheer

As the objects I treasure, yet this cosmopolitan
Can cross the sea at the icy time of the year
In the trail of the big boats, to France.

Mischance is as wide and grey as the lake here
In Chicago. Is there strength enough in my

The craving of Samuel Rouse for clearance to create
was surely as hot as the iron that buffeted him. His passion
for freedom so strong that it molded the smouldering fashions
he laced, for how also could a slave plot
or counterplot such incomparable shapes,

form or reform, for house after house,
the intricate Patio pattern, the delicate
Rose and Lyre, the Debutante Settee,

In a Chicago museum, these small bells of Benin
are bringing their charm to a foreign scene, without ringing.

The concave cylindrical draping of some
is as prim as the poise of a Quaker maid,
while the rare quadrangular forms of the rest,
with their molded latticed designs, suggest
the iron fences, displayed in New Orleans, and everywhere, now.

And who can escape the quaint, spellbound, gargoyle-like bronze faces

“Africans are beasts.”
—The Reverend Carroll Dave Garroway’s Mr. J. Fred Muggs often thumps
quite a rhythmical thump with his feet,

Greeting from a Baha’i
“I salute The Divinity
in you.” As I look into each different face,

To see you standing in the sagging bookstore door
So filled me with chagrin that suddenly you seemed as
Pink and white to me as newborn, hairless mouse. For

I had hoped to delight you at home. Be a furl
Of faint perfume and Vienna’s cord like lace,
To shine my piano till a shimmer of mother-of-pearl

Embraced it. To pleasantly surprise you with the grace
That transcends my imitation and much worn