Closing Time

The Fair has run its course. You can almost hear the dying strains of “After the Ball”,

Many a heart was aching, if you could read them all,
Many a hope that has vanished, after the ball.

or the resonant ending of Joyce’s “Araby”, the epiphany that launched a thousand New Yorker stories.

Gumshoe Lew gets transferred to Colorado and the Chums get orders to ship out.

Frederick Jackson Turner delivers his frontier thesis. “The single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history” goes unremarked.

Later, after closing day, as autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie, (p.55)

The Windhover is sighted. This magnificent poem that Hopkins called “the best thing I ever wrote,” will sit in a drawer for twenty years.

The hungry and homeless, the invisible army of want “who had always been there” move in, and will burn the White City down, trying to keep warm.