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passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow (carl sandburg)

I. You are always from Chicago. A great freezing greed beats beneath its streets, below the reel, lurch, bellow and bawl; it remembers the stockyards, brandings burnt into flesh. (The city catches and keeps you that way, bounded by the dark girders of the El, your heart dropped in that trashcan on the corner of Halsted and Monroe.)

II. You are never alone in the pedway. There are always a few people walking ahead of you—a woman in sensible heels, a man with a messenger bag. No one speaks and yet there is a whispered white noise crowding at your ears, just beneath the rasp of your own breathing.

III. All day the snow falls, all night the snow falls. When morning comes, there is only the crust of grey ice, sidewalks ghostly under a patina of washed-out salt.

IV. The rattling of the El arrives before the train does, and sometimes in absence of a train entirely.

V. A young man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge. His soul has gone into the stones of the building. (The family tried to negotiate for it, brought in a pale-faced priest with Lodz still under his nails to speak for the defense. But Chicago keeps no creed, prefers no particular spire; does not recognize any higher power.

The building refused to give it back.)

VI. The tollbooths on the Skyway were soundproofed in ‘04. The screaming was unsettling the tourists.

VII. Construction has been stalled beneath a coming soon banner for more than just one winter, the lettering faded by sun and snowmelt. There are rumors of funding drying up, of the project being shut down—but the chain-link fence and blue sheeting stands, red warnings against unauthorized entry.

Men wearing hardhats go in, and do not emerge again. At night, a light burns in the window of the site office.

VIII. Once a year, the Field sends an intern into permanent collection. Such lifelike eyes! the manager exclaims, making the collections assistant blush. Thank you, she says. I used the Akeley method.

Visiting hours for the family are from 10-5, every day except Christmas.

IX. Strange things wash up on shore in Calumet Park. The park district does not like to discuss it.

X. You walk through the snow-hushed Loop to the train, stopping to let another taxi whisk past you onto Michigan. The Bowman, half-slumped over his horse’s neck, watches you with tired eyes. When he blinks, there is the sound of bronze scraping bronze.

The Spearman is looking off into the distance, to where you imagine the dark sky meets the dark breadth of the lake. He has relaxed his hands to his lap, and they rest there, enormous fingers wound in a lock of the horse’s mane.

Beneath him, the stallion shakes off the gathering snow with a twitch like the clatter of bells.