In the mammoth sunshine of our cities we remember our blues the way the slaves remember.
No heart, no intellect, but we got rhythm!
Look at the towers!
Look at the sky—that's blue, too, baby!
The streets are straight, the blocks are square, the intersections regular. The shadows are geometry—they dive one hundred stories. It is a gameboard, ruled and sharp by transit here and plummet there, concrete and rectilinear.
This
we call traffic.
It is the way we move on the board.
Trucks and taxis playing fast chess to the beat of the Christmas-colored signals. We are a great, free, democratic people whose trains run approximately on time. In this civilization, eight-o'clock children make skip-ropes of rainbows and slide down the balustrades of sunbeams. One contraction of our chamber of commerce ventricle will thrust ten thousand tons of ore from Duluth to Pittsburgh.
We rate fireflies in kilowatts.
But we hate to see the evening sun go down.
Paul Bunyan's ox was blue. So—our hills, the evening in our thoroughfares, our dying lips.
Hence, when we talk about rue in these United States, brother, we do it in brass! We put
pistons and kilowatts in our lament, grief, sorrow, lostness!