I HEARD a woman's lips
Speaking to a companion
Say these words:

"A woman what hustles
Never keeps nothin'
For all her hustlin'.
Somebody always gets
What she goes on the street for.
If it ain't a ****
It's a bull what gets it.
I been hustlin' now
Till I ain't much good any more.
I got nothin' to show for it.
Some man got it all,
Every night's hustlin' I ever did."

RED gold of pools,
Sunset furrows six o'clock,
And the farmer done in the fields
And the cows in the barns with bulging udders.
  
Take the cows and the farmer,
Take the barns and bulging udders.
Leave the red gold of pools
And sunset furrows six o'clock.
The farmer's wife is singing.
The farmer's boy is whistling.
I wash my hands in red gold of pools.

ONE man killed another. The saying between them had been "I'd give you the shirt off my back."
  
The killer wept over the dead. The dead if he looks back knows the killer was sorry. It was a shot in one second of hate out of ten years of love.
  
Why is the sun a red ball in the six o'clock mist?
Why is the moon a tumbling chimney?... tumbling ... tumbling ... "I'd give you the shirt off my back" ... And I'll **** you if my head goes wrong.

HATS, where do you belong?
  what is under you?
  
On the rim of a skyscraper's forehead
I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,
Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.
  Hats: tell me your high hopes.

THERE are places I go when I am strong.
One is a marsh pool where I used to go
            with a long-ear hound-dog.
One is a wild crabapple tree; I was there
      a moonlight night with a girl.
The dog is gone; the girl is gone; I go to these
      places when there is no other place to go.

Have me in the blue and the sun.
Have me on the open sea and the mountains.

When I go into the grass of the sea floor, I will go alone.
This is where I came from--the chlorine and the salt are
     blood and bones.
It is here the nostrils rush the air to the lungs. It is
     here oxygen clamors to be let in.
And here in the root grass of the sea floor I will go alone.

Love goes far. Here love ends.
Have me in the blue and the sun.

KEEP a red heart of memories
Under the great gray rain sheds of the sky,
Under the open sun and the yellow gloaming embers.
Remember all paydays of lilacs and songbirds;
All starlights of cool memories on storm paths.
  
Out of this prairie rise the faces of dead men.
They speak to me. I can not tell you what they say.
  
Other faces rise on the prairie.
  They are the unborn. The future.
  
Yesterday and to-morrow cross and mix on the skyline
The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets. One waits.
  
In the yellow dust of sunsets, in the meadows of vermilion eight o'clock June nights ... the dead men and the unborn children speak to me ... I can not tell you what they say ... you listen and you know.
  
I don't care who you are, man:
I know a woman is looking for you
and her soul is a corn-tassel kissing a south-west wind.
(The farm-boy whose face is the color of brick-dust, is calling the cows; he will form the letter X with crossed streams of milk from the teats; he will beat a tattoo on the bottom of a tin pail with X's of milk.)
  
I don't care who you are, man:
I know sons and daughters looking for you
And they are gray dust working toward star paths
And you see them from a garret window when you laugh
At your luck and murmur, "I don't care."
  
I don't care who you are, woman:
I know a man is looking for you
And his soul is a south-west wind kissing a corn-tassel.
  
(The kitchen ******* the farm is throwing oats to the chickens and the buff of their feathers says hello to the sunset's late maroon.)
  
I don't care who you are, woman:
I know sons and daughters looking for you
And they are next year's wheat or the year after hidden in the dark and loam.
  
My love is a yellow hammer spinning circles in Ohio, Indiana. My love is a redbird shooting flights in straight lines in Kentucky and Tennessee. My love is an early robin flaming an ember of copper on her shoulders in March and April. My love is a graybird living in the eaves of a Michigan house all winter. Why is my love always a crying thing of wings?
  
On the Indiana dunes, in the Mississippi marshes, I have asked: Is it only a fishbone on the beach?
Is it only a dog's jaw or a horse's skull whitening in the sun? Is the red heart of man only ashes? Is the flame of it all a white light switched off and the power house wires cut?
  
Why do the prairie roses answer every summer? Why do the changing repeating rains come back out of the salt sea wind-blown? Why do the stars keep their tracks? Why do the cradles of the sky rock new babies?

THE WISHES on this child's mouth
Came like snow on marsh cranberries;
The tamarack kept something for her;
The wind is ready to help her shoes.
The north has loved her; she will be
A grandmother feeding geese on frosty
Mornings; she will understand
Early snow on the cranberries
Better and better then.

THIN sheets of blue smoke among white slabs ... near the shingle mill ... winter morning.
Falling of a dry leaf might be heard ... circular steel tears through a log.
***** of woodland ... brown ... soft ... tinge of blue such as ***** eyes.
Farther, field fires ... funnel of yellow smoke ... spellings of other yellow in corn stubble.
Bobsled on a down-hill road ... February snow mud ... horses steaming ... Oscar the driver sings ragtime under a spot of red seen a mile ... the red wool yarn of Oscar's stocking cap is seen from the shingle mill to the ridge of hemlock and cedar.

OUT of the testimony of such reluctant lips, out of the oaths and mouths of such scrupulous liars, out of perjurers whose hands swore by God to the white sun before all men,
  
Out of a rag saturated with smears and smuts gathered from the footbaths of kings and the **** cloths of ******, from the scabs of Babylon and Jerusalem to the scabs of London and New York,
  
From such a rag that has wiped the secret sores of kings and overlords across the milleniums of human marches and babblings,
  
From such a rag perhaps I shall wring one reluctant desperate drop of blood, one honest-to-God spot of red speaking a mother-heart.December, 1918.Christiania, Norway

HOKUSAI'S portrait of himself
Tells what his hat was like
And his arms and legs. The only faces
Are a river and a mountain
And two laughing farmers.
  
  The smile of Hokusai
  is under his hat.

I REMEMBER the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness.
And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown.
And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling ***** and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song.

IN a Yiddish eating place on Rivington Street ... faces ... coffee spots ... children kicking at the night stars with bare toes from bare buttocks.
They know it is September on Rivington when the red tomaytoes cram the pushcarts,
Here the children snozzle at milk bottles, children who have never seen a cow.
Here the stranger wonders how so many people remember where they keep home fires.

THE SEA rocks have a green moss.
The pine rocks have red berries.
I have memories of you.
  
Speak to me of how you miss me.
Tell me the hours go long and slow.
  
Speak to me of the drag on your heart,
The iron drag of the long days.
  
I know hours empty as a beggar's tin cup on a rainy day, empty as a soldier's sleeve with an arm lost.
  
Speak to me ...

IT'S a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba ******* snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
  The cartoonists weep in their beer.
  Ship riveters talk with their feet
  To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
    "I got the blues.
    I got the blues.
    I got the blues."
And ... as we said earlier:
  The cartoonists weep in their beer.

I AM a hoodlum, you are a hoodlum, we and all of us are a world of hoodlums-maybe so.
I hate and **** better men than I am, so do you, so do all of us-maybe-maybe so.
In the ends of my fingers the itch for another man's neck, I want to see him hanging, one of dusk's cartoons against the sunset.
This is the hate my father gave me, this was in my mother's milk, this is you and me and all of us in a world of hoodlums-maybe so.
Let us go on, brother hoodlums, let us **** and ****, it has always been so, it will always be so, there is nothing more to it.
Let us go on, sister hoodlums, ****, ****, and ****, the torsoes of the world's mother's are tireless and the ***** of the world's fathers are strong-so go on-****, ****, ****.
Lay them deep in the dirt, the stiffs we fixed, the cadavers bumped off, lay them deep and let the night winds of winter blizzards howl their burial service.
The night winds and the winter, the great white sheets of northern blizzards, who can sing better for the lost hoodlums the old requiem, "**** him! **** him!..."
Today my son, to-morrow yours, the day after your next door neighbor's-it is all in the wrists of the gods who shoot craps-it is anybody's guess whose eyes shut next.
Being a hoodlum now, you and I, being all of us a world of hoodlums, let us take up the cry when the mob sluffs by on a thousand shoe soles, let us too yammer, "**** him! **** him!..."
Let us do this now ... for our mothers ... for our sisters and wives ... let us ****, ****, ****-for the torsoes of the women are tireless and the ***** of the men are strong.Chicago, July 29, 1919.

FIRST I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind.
Next I would like to write one for you to sit on a hill and read down the river valley on a late summer afternoon, reading it in less than a whisper to Jack on his soft wire legs learning to stand up and preach, Jack-in-the-pulpit.
As many poems as I have written to the moon and the streaming of the moon spinners of light, so many of the summer moon and the winter moon I would like to shoot along to your ears for nothing, for a laugh, a song,
  for nothing at all,
  for one look from you,
  for your face turned away
  and your voice in one clutch
  half way between a tree wind moan
  and a night-bird sob.
Believe nothing of it all, pay me nothing, open your window for the other singers and keep it shut for me.
The road I am on is a long road and I can go hungry again like I have gone hungry before.
What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?
Leave me with the hoot owl.
I have slept in a blanket listening.
He learned it, he must have learned it
From two moons, the summer moon,
And the winter moon
And the streaming of the moon spinners of light.

LET us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter's day, gray wind pattering frozen raindrops on the window,
And let us talk about milk wagon drivers and grocery delivery boys.

Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot punches-and talk about mail carriers and messenger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks.
Let us write of olden, golden days and hunters of the Holy Grail and men called "knights" riding horses in the rain, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved.

A roustabout hunched on a coal wagon goes by, icicles drip on his hat rim, sheets of ice wrapping the hunks of coal, the caravanserai a gray blur in slant of rain.
Let us nudge the steam radiator with our wool slippers and write poems of Launcelot, the hero, and Roland, the hero, and all the olden golden men who rode horses in the rain.

TWO Swede families live downstairs and an Irish policeman upstairs, and an old soldier, Uncle Joe.
Two Swede boys go upstairs and see Joe. His wife is dead, his only son is dead, and his two daughters in Missouri and Texas don't want him around.
The boys and Uncle Joe crack walnuts with a hammer on the bottom of a flatiron while the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass.
Joe tells the Swede boys all about Chickamauga and Chattanooga, how the Union soldiers crept in rain somewhere a dark night and ran forward and killed many Rebels, took flags, held a hill, and won a victory told about in the histories in school.
Joe takes a piece of carpenter's chalk, draws lines on the floor and piles stove wood to show where six regiments were slaughtered climbing a *****.
"Here they went" and "Here they went," says Joe, and the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass.
The two Swede boys go downstairs with a big blur of guns, men, and hills in their heads. They eat herring and potatoes and tell the family war is a wonder and soldiers are a wonder.
One breaks out with a cry at supper: I wish we had a war now and I could be a soldier.

HOW much do you love me, a million bushels?
Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.
  
And to-morrow maybe only half a bushel?
To-morrow maybe not even a half a bushel.
  
And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.

THE HIGH horses of the sea broke their white riders
On the walls that held and counted the hours
The wind lasted.
  
Two landbirds looked on and the north and the east
Looked on and the wind poured cups of foam
And the evening began.
  
The old men in the shanties looked on and lit their
Pipes and the young men spoke of the girls
For a wild night like this.
  
The south and the west looked on and the moon came
When the wind went down and the sea was sorry
And the singing slow.
  
Ask how the sunset looked between the wind going
Down and the moon coming up and I would struggle
To tell the how of it.
  
I give you fire here, I give you water, I give you
The wind that blew them across and across,
The scooping, mixing wind.

IF I had a million lives to live
    and a million deaths to die
    in a million humdrum worlds,
I'd like to change my name
    and have a new house number to go by
    each and every time I died
    and started life all over again.

I wouldn't want the same name every time
    and the same old house number always,
    dying a million deaths,
    dying one by one a million times:
    -would you?
              or you?
                    or you?

WHY should I be wondering
How you would look in black velvet and yellow? in orange and green?
I who cannot remember whether it was a dash of blue
Or a whirr of red under your willow throat-
Why do I wonder how you would look in humming-bird feathers?

Dragoons, I tell you the white hydrangeas
     turn rust and go soon.
Already mid September a line of brown runs
     over them.
One sunset after another tracks the faces, the
     petals.
Waiting, they look over the fence for what
     way they go.

I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
     done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
     world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
     come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
     then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
     for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
     I forget. The best of me is ****** out and wasted.
     I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
     makes me work and give up what I have. And I
     forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
     drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
     People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
     forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
     a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
     say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
     sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.

I know an ice handler who wears a flannel shirt with
     pearl buttons the size of a dollar,
And he lugs a hundred-pound hunk into a saloon ice-
     box, helps himself to cold ham and rye bread,
Tells the bartender it's hotter than yesterday and will be
     hotter yet to-morrow, by Jesus,
And is on his way with his head in the air and a hard
     pair of fists.
He spends a dollar or so every Saturday night on a two
     hundred pound woman who washes dishes in the
     Hotel Morrison.
He remembers when the union was organized he broke
     the noses of two scabs and loosened the nuts so the
     wheels came off six different wagons one morning,
     and he came around and watched the ice melt in the
     street.
All he was sorry for was one of the scabs bit him on the
     knuckles of the right hand so they bled when he
     came around to the saloon to tell the boys about it.

BURY this old Illinois farmer with respect.
He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields.
Now he goes on a long sleep.
The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, the wind that combed his red beard zero mornings when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the bushel basket at the corncrib,
The same wind will now blow over the place here where his hands must dream of Illinois corn.

Remembrance for a great man is this.
The newsies are pitching pennies.
And on the copper disk is the man's face.
Dead lover of boys, what do you ask for now?

To the Williamson Brothers

High noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue
     asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors.
     Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching
     play of sun-fire to their skin and eyes.

Inside the playhouse are movies from under the sea.
     From the heat of pavements and the dust of sidewalks,
     passers-by go in a breath to be witnesses of
     large cool sponges, large cool fishes, large cool valleys
     and ridges of coral spread silent in the soak of
     the ocean floor thousands of years.

A naked swimmer dives. A knife in his right hand
     shoots a streak at the throat of a shark. The tail
     of the shark lashes. One swing would **** the swimmer...
     Soon the knife goes into the soft under-
     neck of the veering fish... Its mouthful of teeth,
     each tooth a dagger itself, set row on row, glistens
     when the shuddering, yawning cadaver is hauled up
     by the brothers of the swimmer.

Outside in the street is the murmur and singing of life
     in the sun--horses, motors, women trapsing along
     in flimsy clothes, play of sun-fire in their blood.

BEES and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner-a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.

And I ask no better a winding sheet
            (over the earth and under the sun.)

Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.

Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey-who loses and remembers?-who keeps and forgets?

In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep.

IN the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding.
One of these days...
          they will need winding.

Rabelais in red boards,
Walt Whitman in green,
Hugo in ten-cent paper covers,
Here they stand on shelves
In the cool of the night time
And there is nothing...
To be said against them...
Or for them...
In the cool of the night time
And the clocks.

A man in pigeon-gray pyjamas.
The open window begins at his feet
And goes taller than his head.
Eight feet high is the pattern.

Moon and mist make an oblong layout.
Silver at the man's bare feet.
He swings one foot in a moon silver.
And it costs nothing.

One more day of bread and work.
One more day ... so much rags...
The man barefoot in moon silver
Mutters "You" and "You"
To things hidden
In the cool of the night time,
In Rabelais, Whitman, Hugo,
In an oblong of moon mist.

Out from the window ... prairielands.
Moon mist whitens a golf ground.
Whiter yet is a limestone quarry.
The crickets keep on chirring.

Switch engines of the Great Western
Sidetrack box cars, make up trains
For Weehawken, Oskaloosa, Saskatchewan;
The cattle, the coal, the corn, must go
In the night ... on the prairielands.

Chuff-chuff go the pulses.
They beat in the cool of the night time.
Chuff-chuff and chuff-chuff...
These heartbeats travel the night a mile
And touch the moon silver at the window
And the bones of the man.
It costs nothing.

Rabelais in red boards,
Whitman in green,
Hugo in ten-cent paper covers,
Here they stand on shelves
In the cool of the night time
And the clocks.

LET us go out of the fog, John, out of the filmy persistent drizzle on the streets of Stockholm, let us put down the collars of our raincoats, take off our hats and sit in the newspapers office.
  
Let us sit among the telegrams-clickety-click-the kaiser's crown goes into the gutter and the Hohenzollern throne of a thousand years falls to pieces a one-hoss shay.
  
It is a fog night out and the umbrellas are up and the collars of the raincoats-and all the steamboats up and down the Baltic sea have their lights out and the wheelsmen sober.
  
Here the telegrams come-one king goes and another-butter is costly: there is no butter to buy for our bread in Stockholm-and a little patty of butter costs more than all the crowns of Germany.
  
Let us go out in the fog, John, let us roll up our raincoat collars and go on the streets where men are sneering at the kings.

Guns,
Long, steel guns,
Pointed from the war ships
In the name of the war god.
Straight, shining, polished guns,
Clambered over with jackies in white blouses,
Glory of tan faces, tousled hair, white teeth,
Laughing lithe jackies in white blouses,
Sitting on the guns singing war songs, war chanties.

Shovels,
Broad, iron shovels,
Scooping out oblong vaults,
Loosening turf and leveling sod.

     I ask you
     To witness--
     The shovel is brother to the gun.

I sang to you and the moon
But only the moon remembers.
     I sang
O reckless free-hearted
          free-throated rythms,
Even the moon remembers them
     And is kind to me.

Women of night life amid the lights
Where the line of your full, round throats
Matches in gleam the glint of your eyes
And the ring of your heart-deep laughter:
     It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.

Women of night life along the shadows,
Lean at your throats and skulking the walls,
Gaunt as a ***** worn to the bone,
Under the paint of your smiling faces:
     It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.

I RISE out of my depths with my language.
You rise out of your depths with your language.

Two tongues from the depths,
Alike only as a yellow cat and a green parrot are alike,
Fling their staccato tantalizations
Into a wildcat jabber
Over a gossamer web of unanswerables.

The second and the third silence,
Even the hundredth silence,
Is better than no silence at all
(Maybe this is a jabber too-are we at it again, you and I?)

I rise out of my depths with my language.
You rise out of your depths with your language.

One thing there is much of; the name men call it by is time; into this gulf our syllabic pronunciamentos empty by the way rockets of fire curve and are gone on the night sky; into this gulf the jabberings go as the shower at a scissors grinder's wheel...

Jack was a swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun.
He worked thirty years on the railroad, ten hours a day,
     and his hands were tougher than sole leather.
He married a tough woman and they had eight children
     and the woman died and the children grew up and
     went away and wrote the old man every two years.
He died in the poorhouse sitting on a bench in the sun
     telling reminiscences to other old men whose women
     were dead and children scattered.
There was joy on his face when he died as there was joy
     on his face when he lived--he was a swarthy, swaggering
     son-of-a-gun.

BOTH were jailbirds; no speechmakers at all; speaking best with one foot on a brass rail; a beer glass in the left hand and the right hand employed for gestures.
  
And both were lights snuffed out ... no warning ... no lingering:
  
Who knew the hearts of these boozefighters?

Your bow swept over a string, and a long low note
     quivered to the air.
(A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child perfect
     learning to **** milk.)

Your bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering
     and wild.
(All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon
     in the hills with their lovers.)

Seven nations stood with their hands on the jaws of death.
It was the first week in August, Nineteen Hundred Fourteen.
I was listening, you were listening, the whole world was
     listening,
And all of us heard a Voice murmuring:
               "I am the way and the light,
               He that believeth on me
               Shall not perish
               But shall have everlasting life."
Seven nations listening heard the Voice and answered:
               "O Hell!"
The jaws of death began clicking and they go on clicking.
               "O Hell !"

DRUM on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.
  
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go hushahusha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.
  
Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome tree-tops, moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang! you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns, tin cans-make two people fight on the top of a stairway and scratch each other's eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs.
  
Can the rough stuff ... now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo ... and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars ... a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills ... go to it, O jazzmen.

Six years I worked in a knitting mill at a machine
And then I married Jerry, the iceman, for a change.
He weighed 240 pounds, and could hold me,
Who weighed 105 pounds, outward easily with one hand.
He came home drunk and lay on me with the breath of stale
   beer
Blowing from him and jumbled talk that didn't mean anything.
I stood it two years and one hot night when I refused him
And he struck his bare fist against my nose so it bled,
I waited till he slept, took a revolver from a bureau drawer,
Placed the end of it to his head and pulled the trigger.
From the stone walls where I am incarcerated for the natural
   term
Of life, I proclaim I would do it again.

INTO the gulf and the pit of the dark night, the cold night, there is a man goes into the dark and the cold and when he comes back to his people he brings fire in his hands and they remember him in the years afterward as the fire bringer-they remember or forget-the man whose head kept singing to the want of his home, the want of his people.

For this man there is no name thought of-he has broken from jungles and the old oxen and the old wagons-circled the earth with ships-belted the earth with steel-swung with wings and a drumming motor in the high blue sky-shot his words on a wireless way through shattering sea storms:-out from the night and out from the jungles his head keeps singing-there is no road for him but on and on.

Against the sea bastions and the land bastions, against the great air pockets of stars and atoms, he points a finger, finds a release clutch, touches a button no man knew before.

The soldier with a smoking gun and a gas mask-the workshop man under the smokestacks and the blueprints-these two are brothers of the handshake never forgotten-for these two we give the salt tears of our eyes, the salute of red roses, the flame-won scarlet of poppies.

For the soldier who gives all, for the workshop man who gives all, for these the red bar is on the flag-the red bar is the heart's-blood of the mother who gave him, the land that gave him.

The gray foam and the great wheels of war go by and take all-and the years give mist and ashes-and our feet stand at these, the memory places of the known and the unknown, and our hands give a flame-won poppy-our hands touch the red bar of a flag for the sake of those who gave-and gave all.

ON the one hand the steel works.
On the other hand the penitentiary.
Sante Fe trains and Alton trains
Between smokestacks on the west
And gray walls on the east.
And Lockport down the river.

Part of the valley is God's.
And part is man's.
The river course laid out
A thousand years ago.
The canals ten years back.

The sun on two canals and one river
Makes three stripes of silver
Or copper and gold
Or shattered sunflower leaves.
    Talons of an iceberg
    Scraped out this valley.
    Claws of an avalanche loosed here.

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere--
Let joy **** you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

THE SHALE and water thrown together so-so first of all,
Then a potter's hand on the wheel and his fingers shaping the jug; out of the mud a mouth and a handle;
Slimpsy, loose and ready to fall at a touch, fire plays on it, slow fire coaxing all the water out of the shale mix.
Dipped in glaze more fire plays on it till a molasses lava runs in waves, rises and retreats, a varnish of volcanoes.
Take it now; out of mud now here is a mouth and handle; out of this now mothers will pour milk and maple syrup and cider, vinegar, apple juice, and sorghum.
There is nothing proud about this; only one out of many; the potter's wheel slings them out and the fires harden them hours and hours thousands and thousands.
"Be good to me, put me down easy on the floors of the new concrete houses; I was poured out like a concrete house and baked in fire too."

Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia,
     Scarlet Chinese talker of summer.
Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula's
          hair,
     And fluff of white from a cottonwood.

In western fields of corn and northern timber lands,
     They talk about me, a saloon with a soul,
     The soft red lights, the long curving bar,
     The leather seats and dim corners,
     Tall brass spittoons, a ****** cutting ham,
And the painting of a woman half-dressed thrown reckless
     across a bed after a night of ***** and riots.

THE SNOW piles in dark places are gone.
Pools by the railroad tracks shine clear.
The gravel of all shallow places shines.
A white pigeon reels and somersaults.
  
Frogs plutter and squdge-and frogs beat the air with a recurring thin steel sliver of melody.
Crows go in fives and tens; they march their black feathers past a blue pool; they celebrate an old festival.
A spider is trying his webs, a pink bug sits on my hand washing his forelegs.
I might ask: Who are these people?

I am singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:

     Under the sun
Are sixteen million men,
Chosen for shining teeth,
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.

     And a red juice runs on the green grass;
And a red juice soaks the dark soil.
And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing
          and killing.

     I never forget them day or night:
They beat on my head for memory of them;
They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,
To their homes and women, dreams and games.

     I wake in the night and smell the trenches,
And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines--
Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:
Some of them long sleepers for always,

Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,
Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak,
Eating and drinking, toiling... on a long job of
          killing.
Sixteen million men.