Prairie School

Chicago's magnificent cubic scatter across the snow-sketched prairie,
its arrowing ascension and continental horizontality,
its railyard conjury and truckway bricollage,
its voluble thrum of human self-assurance-
discourse of happenstance or absolute mastery,
monologue ofthe jackal as known on Kedzie, Pulaski, Cicero,
street rant of the prophet roaming those wide, western avenues
cloaked in an aurora of enlightenment or psychosis.