METROPOLIS: BOLSHEVIK SUPER-POEM IN 5 CANTOS
I

Here’s my brutal
and multispirited
poem
to the new city.

                                O city all tense
                                with cables and with efforts,
                                all resounding
                                with motors and with wings.

                                Simultaneous explosion
                                of new theories,
                                a bit further
On the spatial plane
                                from Whitman and from Turner
                                and a bit closer
                                to Maples Arce.

The lungs of Russia
blow the wind
of social revolution toward us.
Literary zipper-robbers
will understand nothing
of this new sweaty
beauty of the century,
                                and the ripe
                                moons
                                that fell,
                                are this putrefaction
                                that reaches us
                                from intellectual sewage pipes.
Here’s my poem:
                                O city strong
                                and manifold,
                                made all of iron and of steel!

Docks. Inner harbors.
Cranes.
                And the sexual fever
                of industrial plants.
                Metropolis:
                                Bodyguards of trams
                                that traverse the subversivist streets.
                                Window displays accost sidewalks,
                                and the sun, it sacks the avenues.
                                On the fringes of the tariffed
                                days of telephone posts
                                momentary landscapes file
                                through systems of elevator tubes.

Suddenly,
O the green
flash of her eyes!

Beneath the ingenuous shutters of the hour
pass red battalions.
The cannibal romanticism of Yankee music
has gone making its nests in the masts.
O international city!
Toward what remote meridian
cut that ocean liner?
I feel that everything moves away.

Aged dusks
float among the masonry of the scene.
Spectral trains that travel
toward far
away, panting with civilizations.

                                The upset multitude
                                sloshes musically in the streets.

And now, the bourgeois thieves, they will lie down to tremble
for the fortunes
that robbed the town,
but someone concealed beneath their dreams
the spiritual music staff of the explosive.

Here’s my poem:
Pennants of hurrahs into the wind,
inflamed heads of hair
and captive mornings in eyes.

                                O musical
                                city
                                all made of mechanical rhythms!

Tomorrow, perhaps,
only the vivid light of my verses
will illuminate the humiliated horizons.