End of Summer, Chicago Loop, 2010

6 thoughts on “End of Summer, Chicago Loop, 2010”

1. Ah yes, the women,
   Many wear pants very low,
   So we see tramp stamps.

2. Beer, wine, happy hour
   oldies, pop alt and rap blare
   Does she even dance?

3. “Slice-of-life” is my absolute favorite.

   Tired, harried lawyer
   Walking fast, shirttail half out.
   Thirty years, for this?

   This is very nice because it gets you thinking. You want to make up an entire story about the harried lawyer walking past you. Very nice.

   – Madhu

4. I wrote what I saw.

5. I’m sorry, I wasn’t very clear in my previous comment. I got that you wrote what you saw and liked the descriptions. I like to know what people saw and how they saw it. Probably why I like blogs or reading published diaries.

   – Madhu

   (I rarely read poetry, but like this:

   COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802

   EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
   Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
   A sight so touching in its majesty:
   This City now doth, like a garment, wear
   The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
   Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
   Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
   All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
   Never did sun more beautifully steep
   In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
   Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
   The river glideth at his own sweet will:
   Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
   And all that mighty heart is lying still!

   – Wordsworth)

6. Nice Wordsworth.

   Lord Dunsany has a nice passage along similar lines, at the beginning of his story Bethmoora:

   There is a faint freshness in the London night as though some strayed reveler of a breeze had left his comrades in the Kentish uplands and had entered the town by stealth. The pavements are a little damp and shiny. Upon one’s ears that at this late hour have become very acute there hits the tap of a remote footfall. Louder and louder grow the taps, filling the whole night. And a black cloaked figure passes by, and goes tapping into the dark. One who has danced goes homewards. Somewhere a ball has closed its doors and ended. Its yellow lights are out, its musicians are silent, its dancers have all gone into the night air, and Time has said of it, “Let it be past and over, and among the things that I have put away.”
    
   Shadows begin to detach themselves from their great gathering places. No less silently than those shadows that are thin and dead move homewards the stealthy cats. Thus have we even in London our faint forebodings of the dawn’s approach, which the birds and the beasts and the stars are crying aloud to the untrammeled fields.
    
   At what moment I know not I perceive that the night itself is irrevocably overthrown. It is suddenly revealed to me by the weary pallor of the street lamps that the streets are silent and nocturnal still, not because there is any strength in night, but because men have not yet arisen from sleep to defy him. So have I seen dejected and untidy guards still bearing antique muskets in palatial gateways, although the realms of the monarch that they guard have shrunk to a single province which no enemy yet has troubled to overrun.
    
   And it is now manifest from the aspect of the street lamps, those abashed dependants of night, that already English mountain peaks have seen the dawn, that the cliffs of Dover are standing white to the morning, that the sea-mist has lifted and is pouring inland.
    
   And now men with a hose have come and are sluicing out the streets.
    
   Behold now night is dead.
    
   What memories, what fancies throng one’s mind! A night but just now gathered out of London by the horrific hand of Time. A million common artificial things all cloaked for a while in mystery, like beggars robed in purple, and seated on dread thrones. Four million people asleep, dreaming perhaps. What worlds have they gone into? Whom have they met? But my thoughts are far off with Bethmoora in her loneliness, whose gates swing to and fro. …

   The rest is here

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