Chicago Picasso
The two wing-like shapes that are her hair suggest with equal truth
the fragile wings of a butterfly or the powerful flight of an eagle,
while at the same time the rods that connect them to the profile
seem to contain the music of a guitar.
Sir Roland Penrose
One hundred and eight floors up
in the Sears Tower
you can see it all:
vertebrae of a city
hugging the lake front
like an exhausted animal,
steel wheat
rising from the plains of Illinois.
I think of Lincoln and fires.
After two hours in the Loop,
the mind still wanders
with the despair of a commuter,
until
coming down Dearborn there it is —
50 feet high, unreal at first,
icon, grotesque butterfly,
the bird in the horse in the woman,
162 ton offspring
of Picasso and US Steel,
weathering graffiti
with the patience of a saint
in the Richard J. Daley Plaza.
Across the street
a 39 foot Miró looks on,
its sensuous ceramic
nestled between
the First United Methodist Temple
and the Chicago-Tokyo Bank.
