the city of the future

the city of the future
nurses open sores plays
elect a mayor watches
legislators spit under their
desks and vote against
the ERA like it wasn't
really baseball

the explosions tear me up
I feel Vachel's despair
come hopefully out of the
high school across the street
each afternoon and I cannot
help but think this Mars
and these creatures aliens
that do not know the bells
that ring within them

it is so easy to call these avenues
streets of sin and graft
but that stove-piped scarecrow
still walks here still
rings his heart in the prairie
wind still knows that even
time does not divide us

and I love this city of the future
for in my own backyard
grows the tree of laughing bells
and I can just hear them
in the early morning their music
fey and dangerous and impossibly
bright


Another tribute to Vachel Lindsay. Both his poem about Springfield, the City of the Future, and the poem, the Tree of Laughing Bells contribute to this statement. I lived in Springfield for so very many years, and part of me remains there to this day. It is a wondrous and magical place, so incredibly profaned by money and power. But in some ways that makes it so very fascinating. Ghostly, though, for me. Alison once said that every time she came to Springfield it seemed there was a ghost in every house she saw. And of course she wrote the magnum opus statement on Springfield, "stillborn" that was published in the Lindsay tribute, The Village Magazine in 1979. It's a great statement on escaping the City of the Future. I stayed and tried my best to bring Springfield a little closer to Lindsay's vision. I did know some wonderful writers and artists while there, and I got to act on stage with some great and talented folks. I don't regret living there, though I may regret many of the things I did and said in those years.