Brother, I am fire
Surging under the ocean floor.
I shall never meet you, brother--
Not for years, anyhow;
Maybe thousands of years, brother.
Then I will warm you,
Hold you close, wrap you in circles,
Use you and change you--
Maybe thousands of years, brother.

In Abraham Lincoln's city,
Where they remember his lawyer's shingle,
The place where they brought him
Wrapped in battle flags,
Wrapped in the smoke of memories
From Tallahassee to the Yukon,
The place now where the shaft of his tomb
Points white against the blue prairie dome,
In Abraham Lincoln's city ... I saw knucks
In the window of Mister Fischman's second-hand store
On Second Street.

I went in and asked, "How much?"
"Thirty cents apiece," answered Mister Fischman.
And taking a box of new ones off a shelf
He filled anew the box in the showcase
And said incidentally, most casually
And incidentally:
"I sell a carload a month of these."

I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks,
Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern,
And there came to me a set of thoughts like these:
Mister Fischman is for Abe and the "malice to none" stuff,
And the street car strikers and the strike-breakers,
And the sluggers, gunmen, detectives, policemen,

Judges, utility heads, newspapers, priests, lawyers,
They are all for Abe and the "malice to none" stuff.

I started for the door.
"Maybe you want a lighter pair,"
Came Mister Fischman's voice.
I opened the door ... and the voice again:
"You are a funny customer."

Wrapped in battle flags,
Wrapped in the smoke of memories,
This is the place they brought him,
This is Abraham Lincoln's home town.

SELL me a violin, mister, of old mysterious wood.
Sell me a fiddle that has kissed dark nights on the forehead where men kiss sisters they love.
Sell me dried wood that has ached with passion clutching the knees and arms of a storm.
Sell me horsehair and rosin that has ****** at the ******* of the morning sun for milk.
Sell me something crushed in the heartsblood of pain readier than ever for one more song.

There are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
Languages die like rivers.
Words wrapped round your tongue today
And broken to shape of thought
Between your teeth and lips speaking
Now and today
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
Ten thousand years from now.
Sing--and singing--remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago.

I wrote a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
             how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
             into points of mystery quivering with color.

  I answered:
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
             it will all go back to mist,
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and tissue
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers
Go running back to dust and mist.

TWO fishes swimming in the sea,
Two birds flying in the air,
Two chisels on an anvil-maybe.
Beaten, hammered, laughing blue steel to each other-maybe.
Sure I would rather be a chisel with you than a fish.
Sure I would rather be a chisel with you than a bird.
Take these two chisel-pals, O God.
Take 'em and beat 'em, hammer 'em, hear 'em laugh.

THERE was a high majestic fooling
Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.

And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn
There will be high majestic fooling.

The ears ripen in late summer
And come on with a conquering laughter,
Come on with a high and conquering laughter.

The long-tailed blackbirds are hoarse.
One of the smaller blackbirds chitters on a stalk
And a spot of red is on its shoulder
And I never heard its name in my life.

Some of the ears are bursting.
A white juice works inside.
Cornsilk creeps in the end and dangles in the wind.
Always-I never knew it any other way-
The wind and the corn talk things over together.
And the rain and the corn and the sun and the corn
Talk things over together.

Over the road is the farmhouse.
The siding is white and a green blind is slung loose.
It will not be fixed till the corn is husked.
The farmer and his wife talk things over together.

WHEN the jury files in to deliver a verdict after weeks of direct and cross examinations, hot clashes of lawyers and cool decisions of the judge,
There are points of high silence-twiddling of thumbs is at an end-bailiffs near cuspidors take fresh chews of tobacco and wait-and the clock has a chance for its ticking to be heard.
A lawyer for the defense clears his throat and holds himself ready if the word is "Guilty" to enter motion for a new trial, speaking in a soft voice, speaking in a voice slightly colored with bitter wrongs mingled with monumental patience, speaking with mythic Atlas shoulders of many preposterous, unjust circumstances.

THEY have taken the ball of earth
    and made it a little thing.

They were held to the land and horses;
    they were held to the little seas.
They have changed and shaped and welded;
    they have broken the old tools and made
    new ones; they are ranging the white
    scarves of cloudland; they are bumping
    the sunken bells of the Carthaginians
    and Phœnicians:
              they are handling
              the strongest sea
              as a thing to be handled.

The earth was a call that mocked;
    it is belted with wires and meshed with
    steel; from Pittsburg to Vladivostok is
    an iron ride on a moving house; from
    Jerusalem to Tokyo is a reckoned span;
    and they talk at night in the storm and
    salt, the wind and the war.

They have counted the miles to the Sun
    and Canopus; they have weighed a small
    blue star that comes in the southeast
    corner of the sky on a foretold errand.

We shall search the sea again.
We shall search the stars again.
There are no bars across the way.
There is no end to the plan and the clue,
    the hunt and the thirst.
The motors are drumming, the leather leggings
    and the leather coats wait:
                        Under the sea
                        and out to the stars
                        we go.

CLOWNS DYINGFIVE circus clowns dying this year, morning newspapers told their lives, how each one horizontal in a last gesture of hands arranged by an undertaker, shook thousands into convulsions of laughter from behind rouge-red lips and powder-white face.

STEAMBOAT BILLWhen the boilers of the Robert E. Lee exploded, a steamboat winner of many races on the Mississippi went to the bottom of the river and never again saw the wharves of Natchez and New Orleans.
And a legend lives on that two gamblers were blown toward the sky and during their journey laid bets on which of the two would go higher and which would be first to set foot on the turf of the earth again.

FOOT AND MOUTH PLAGUEWhen the mysterious foot and mouth epidemic ravaged the cattle of Illinois, Mrs. Hector Smith wept bitterly over the government killing forty of her soft-eyed Jersey cows; through the newspapers she wept over her loss for millions of readers in the Great Northwest.

SEVENSThe lady who has had seven lawful husbands has written seven years for a famous newspaper telling how to find love and keep it: seven thousand hungry girls in the Mississippi Valley have read the instructions seven years and found neither illicit loves nor lawful husbands.

PROFITEERI who saw ten strong young men die anonymously, I who saw ten old mothers hand over their sons to the nation anonymously, I who saw ten thousand touch the sunlit silver finalities of undistinguished human glory-why do I sneeze sardonically at a bronze drinking fountain named after one who participated in the war vicariously and bought ten farms?

LET it go on; let the love of this hour be poured out till all the answers are made, the last dollar spent and the last blood gone.
  
Time runs with an ax and a hammer, time slides down the hallways with a pass-key and a master-key, and time gets by, time wins.
  
Let the love of this hour go on; let all the oaths and children and people of this love be clean as a washed stone under a waterfall in the sun.
  
Time is a young man with ballplayer legs, time runs a winning race against life and the clocks, time tickles with rust and spots.
  
Let love go on; the heartbeats are measured out with a measuring glass, so many apiece to gamble with, to use and spend and reckon; let love go on.

THE RIVER is gold under a sunset of Illinois.
It is a molten gold someone pours and changes.
A woman mixing a wedding cake of butter and eggs
Knows what the sunset is pouring on the river here.
The river twists in a letter S.
  A gold S now speaks to the Illinois sky.

EMILY DICKINSON:
You gave us the bumble bee who has a soul,
The everlasting traveler among the hollyhocks,
And how God plays around a back yard garden.

     STEVIE CRANE:
War is kind and we never knew the kindness of war till
          you came;
Nor the black riders and clashes of spear and shield out
          of the sea,
Nor the mumblings and shots that rise from dreams on
          call.

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
     of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
     go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
     and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
     pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
     answers: "Omaha."

In the loam we sleep,
In the cool moist loam,
To the lull of years that pass
And the break of stars.

From the loam, then,
The soft warm loam,
   We rise:
To shape of rose leaf,
Of face and shoulder.

   We stand, then,
   To a whiff of life,
Lifted to the silver of the sun
Over and out of the loam
   A day.

WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw
And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of ******* Creek.

Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices,
Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets,
The fly-by-night towns of Bull Frog and Skiddoo,
The night-cool limestone white of Death Valley,
The straight drop of eight hundred feet
From a shelf road in the Hasiampa Valley:
Men and places they are I never saw.

I have seen three White Horse taverns,
One in Illinois, one in Pennsylvania,
One in a timber-hid road of Wisconsin.

I bought cheese and crackers
Between sun showers in a place called White Pigeon
Nestling with a blacksmith shop, a post-office,
And a berry-crate factory, where four roads cross.

On the Pecatonica River near Freeport
I have seen boys run barefoot in the leaves
Throwing clubs at the walnut trees
In the yellow-and-gold of autumn,
And there was a brown mash dry on the inside of their hands.
On the Cedar Fork Creek of Knox County
I know how the fingers of late October
Loosen the hazel nuts.
I know the brown eyes of half-open hulls.
I know boys named Lindquist, Swanson, Hildebrand.
I remember their cries when the nuts were ripe.
And some are in machine shops; some are in the navy;
And some are not on payrolls anywhere.
Their mothers are through waiting for them to come home.

BODY of Jesus taken down from the cross
Carved in ivory by a lover of Christ,
It is a child's handful you are here,
The breadth of a man's finger,
And this ivory **** cloth
Speaks an interspersal in the day's work,
The carver's prayer and whim
And Christ-love.

THEN came, Oscar, the time of the guns.
And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,
  Unless guns sprang up
  And spoke their language.
The how of running the world was all in guns.
  
The law of a God keeping sea and land apart,
The law of a child ******* milk,
The law of stars held together,
  They slept and worked in the heads of men
  Making twenty mile guns, sixty mile guns,
  Speaking their language
  Of no land for a man, no land for a country
Unless ... guns ... unless ... guns.
  
There was a child wanted the moon shot off the sky,
  asking a long gun to get the moon,
  to conquer the insults of the moon,
  to conquer something, anything,
  to put it over and win the day,
To show them the running of the world was all in guns.
There was a child wanted the moon shot off the sky.
They dreamed ... in the time of the guns ... of guns.

IF I should pass the tomb of Jonah
I would stop there and sit for awhile;
Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark
And came out alive after all.
  
If I pass the burial spot of Nero
I shall say to the wind, "Well, well!"-
I who have fiddled in a world on fire,
I who have done so many stunts not worth doing.
  
I am looking for the grave of Sinbad too.
I want to shake his ghost-hand and say,
"Neither of us died very early, did we?"
  
And the last sleeping-place of Nebuchadnezzar-
When I arrive there I shall tell the wind:
"You ate grass; I have eaten crow-
Who is better off now or next year?"
  
Jack Cade, John Brown, Jesse James,
There too I could sit down and stop for awhile.
I think I could tell their headstones:
"God, let me remember all good losers."
  
I could ask people to throw ashes on their heads
In the name of that sergeant at Belleau Woods,
Walking into the drumfires, calling his men,
"Come on, you ... Do you want to live forever?"

I Have love
And a child,
A banjo
And shadows.
(Losses of God,
All will go
And one day
We will hold
Only the shadows.)

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes.

I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister
And told him we would love each other and take care of
     each other
Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.
Yes, I'm wishing now you lived somewhere away from here
And I was a *** on the bumpers a thousand miles away
     dead broke.
          I wish the kids had never come
          And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
          And a grocery man calling for cash,
          Every day cash for beans and prunes.
          I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
          I wish to God the kids had never come.

Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana
     town and dreamed of romance and big things off
     somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down
     where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and
     when the newspapers came in on the morning mail
     she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all
     the trains ran.
She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office
     chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the
     band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day
And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the
     bars and was going to **** herself
When the thought came to her that if she was going to
     die she might as well die struggling for a clutch of
     romance among the streets of Chicago.
She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement
     of the Boston Store
And even now she beats her head against the bars in the
     same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place
     the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe
     there is

               romance
               and big things
               and real dreams
               that never go smash.

THIS is the song I rested with:
The right shoulder of a strong man I leaned on.
The face of the rain that drizzled on the short neck of a canal boat.
The eyes of a child who slept while death went over and under.
The petals of peony pink that fluttered in a shot of wind come and gone.

This is the song I rested with:
Head, heels, and fingers rocked to the ****** mammy humming of it, to the mile-off steamboat landing whistle of it.

The murmurs run with bees' wings
            in a late summer sun.
They go and come with white surf
            slamming on a beach all day.

  Get this.
And then you may sleep with a late afternoon slumber sun.
Then you may slip your head in an elbow knowing nothing-only sleep.
If so you sleep in the house of our song,
If so you sleep under the apple trees of our song,
Then the face of sleep must be the one face you were looking for.

LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles
over our house and whistling a wolf song under the
eaves.

I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl
the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came.

And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was
beautiful to her and she could not understand.

A man is crossing. a big prairie, says the poem, and
nothing happens--and he goes on and on--and it's
all lonesome and empty and nobody home.

And he goes on and on--and nothing happens--and he
comes on a horse's skull, dry bones of a dead horse--
and you know more than ever it's all lonesome and
empty and nobody home.

And the man raises a horn to his lips and blows--he
fixes a proud neck and forehead toward the empty
sky and the empty land--and blows one last wonder-
cry.

And as the shuttling automatic memory of man clicks
off its results *****-nilly and inevitable as the snick
of a mouse-trap or the trajectory of a 42-centimetre
projectile,

I flash to the form of a man to his hips in snow drifts
of Manitoba and Minnesota--in the sled derby run
from Winnipeg to Minneapolis.

He is beaten in the race the first day out of Winnipeg--
the lead dog is eaten by four team mates--and the
man goes on and on--running while the other racers
ride, running while the other racers sleep--

Lost in a blizzard twenty-four hours, repeating a circle
of travel hour after hour--fighting the dogs who
dig holes in the snow and whimper for sleep--
pushing on--running and walking five hundred
miles to the end of the race--almost a winner--one
toe frozen, feet blistered and frost-bitten.

And I know why a thousand young men of the North-
west meet him in the finishing miles and yell cheers
--I know why judges of the race call him a winner
and give him a special prize even though he is a
loser.

I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding
heart amid the blizzards of five hundred miles that
one last wonder-cry of Childe Roland--and I told
the six year old girl about it.

And while the January wind was ripping at the shingles
and whistling a wolf song under the eaves, her eyes
had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful
to her and she could not understand.

I SAW Man, the man-hunter,
Hunting with a torch in one hand
And a kerosene can in the other,
Hunting with guns, ropes, shackles.
  
  I listened
  And the high cry rang,
The high cry of Man, the man-hunter:
We'll get you yet, you sbxyzch!
  
  I listened later.
  The high cry rang:
**** him! **** him! the sbxyzch!
  
In the morning the sun saw
Two butts of something, a smoking ****,
And a warning in charred wood:
  
        Well, we got him,
        the sbxyzch.

MARY has a thingamajig clamped on her ears
And sits all day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in.
Flashes and flashes-voices and voices calling for ears to pour words in
Faces at the ends of wires asking for other faces at the ends of other wires:
All day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in,
Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears.

THEY put up big wooden gods.
Then they burned the big wooden gods
And put up brass gods and
Changing their minds suddenly
Knocked down the brass gods and put up
A doughface god with gold earrings.
The poor mutts, the pathetic slant heads,
They didn't know a little tin god
Is as good as anything in the line of gods
Nor how a little tin god answers prayer
And makes rain and brings luck
The same as a big wooden god or a brass
God or a doughface god with golden
Earrings.

Many birds and the beating of wings
Make a flinging reckless hum
In the early morning at the rocks
Above the blue pool
Where the gray shadows swim lazy.

In your blue eyes, O reckless child,
I saw today many little wild wishes,
Eager as the great morning.

I WILL keep you and bring hands to hold you against a great hunger.
I will run a spear in you for a great gladness to die with.
I will stab you between the ribs of the left side with a great love worth remembering.

Fling your red scarf faster and faster, dancer.
It is summer and the sun loves a million green leaves,
     masses of green.
Your red scarf flashes across them calling and a-calling.
The silk and flare of it is a great soprano leading a
     chorus
Carried along in a rouse of voices reaching for the heart
     of the world.
Your toes are singing to meet the song of your arms:

Let the red scarf go swifter.
Summer and the sun command you.

Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
     red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
     maneuvers, I stood silent;
Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant
     over the horizon's grass, I was full of thoughts.
Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers,
     mothers lifting their children--these all I
     touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.
And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions
     of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than
     crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the
     darkness of night--and all broken, humble ruins of nations.

Maybe he believes me, maybe not.
Maybe I can marry him, maybe not.

Maybe the wind on the prairie,
The wind on the sea, maybe,
Somebody, somewhere, maybe can tell.

I will lay my head on his shoulder
And when he asks me I will say yes,
Maybe.

THE BRASS medallion profile of your face I keep always.
It is not jingling with loose change in my pockets.
It is not stuck up in a show place on the office wall.
I carry it in a special secret pocket in the day
And it is under my pillow at night.
The brass came from a long ways off: it was up against hell and high water, fire and flood, before the face was put on it.
It is the side of a head; a woman wishes; a woman waits; a woman swears behind silent lips that the sea will bring home what is gone.

We look on the shoulders filling the stage of the Chicago Auditorium.

A fat mayor has spoken much English and the mud of his speech is crossed with quicksilver hisses elusive and rapid from floor and gallery.

A neat governor speaks English and the listeners ring chimes to his clear thoughts.

Joffre speaks a few words in French; this is a voice of the long firing line that runs from the salt sea dunes of Flanders to the white spear crags of the Swiss mountains.

This is the man on whose yes and no has hung the death of battalions and brigades; this man speaks of the tricolor of his country now melted in a great resolve with the starred bunting of Lincoln and Washington.

This is the hero of the Marne, massive, irreckonable; he lets tears roll down his cheek; they trickle a wet salt off his chin onto the blue coat.

There is a play of American hands and voices equal to sea-breakers and a lift of white sun on a stony beach.

HE lived on the wings of storm.
The ashes are in Chihuahua.

Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado
Sprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots, Cornishmen, Yanks.
Killings ran under the spoken commands of this boy
With eighty men and rifles on a hogback mountain.

They killed swearing to remember
The shot and charred wives and children
In the burnt camp of Ludlow,
And Louis Tikas, the laughing Greek,
Plugged with a bullet, clubbed with a gun ****.

As a home war
It held the nation a week
And one or two million men stood together
And swore by the retribution of steel.

It was all accidental.
He lived flecking lint off coat lapels
Of men he talked with.
He kissed the miners' babies
And wrote a Denver paper
Of picket silhouettes on a mountain line.

He had no mother but Mother Jones
Crying from a jail window of Trinidad:
"All I want is room enough to stand
And shake my fist at the enemies of the human race."

Named by a grand jury as a murderer
He went to Chihuahua, forgot his old Scotch name,
Smoked cheroots with Pancho Villa
And wrote letters of Villa as a rock of the people.

How can I tell how Don Magregor went?

Three riders emptied lead into him.
He lay on the main street of an inland town.
A boy sat near all day throwing stones
To keep pigs away.

The Villa men buried him in a pit
With twenty Carranzistas.

There is drama in that point...
...the boy and the pigs.
Griffith would make a movie of it to fetch sobs.
Victor Herbert would have the drums whirr
In a weave with a high fiddle-string's single clamor.

"And the muchacho sat there all day throwing stones
To keep the pigs away," wrote Gibbons to the Tribune.

Somewhere in Chihuahua or Colorado
Is a leather bag of poems and short stories.

THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.
  
Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails who speak and keep thoughts in ****** brown.
  
These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts; these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I turn my head and say good-by to no one who hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.

You never come back.
I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,
The hopeless open doors that call and wait
And take you then for--how many cents a day?
How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?

I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,
In the dark, in the silence, day by day,
And all the blood of you drop by drop,
And you are old before you are young.
          You never come back.

THE SHEETS of night mist travel a long valley.
I know why you came at sundown in a scarf mist.
  
What was it we touched asking nothing and asking all?
How many times can death come and pay back what we saw?
  
In the oath of the sod, the lips that swore,
In the oath of night mist, nothing and all,
A riddle is here no man tells, no woman.

THIS Mohammedan colonel from the Caucasus yells with his voice and wigwags with his arms.
The interpreter translates, "I was a friend of Kornilov, he asks me what to do and I tell him."
A stub of a man, this Mohammedan colonel ... a projectile shape ... a bald head hammered ...
"Does he fight or do they put him in a cannon and shoot him at the enemy?"
This fly-by-night, this bull-roarer who knows everybody.
"I write forty books, history of Islam, history of Europe, true religion, scientific farming, I am the Roosevelt of the Caucasus, I go to America and ride horses in the moving pictures for $500,000, you get $50,000 ..."
"I have 30,000 acres in the Caucasus, I have a stove factory in Petrograd the bolsheviks take from me, I am an old friend of the Czar, I am an old family friend of Clemenceau ..."
These hands strangled three fellow workers for the czarist restoration, took their money, sent them in sacks to a river bottom ... and scandalized Stockholm with his gang of strangler women.
Mid-sea strangler hands rise before me illustrating a wish, "I ride horses for the moving pictures in America, $500,000, and you get ten per cent ..."
This rider of fugitive dawns....

Momus is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
     Against horizons purple, silent.

     Yes, Momus,
Men have flung your face in bronze
To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.
They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,
Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;
All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones
Thrown over and through with a smile that forever
     wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the
     iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone
     into dreams, by God.

I wonder, Momus,
Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look
     with deep laughter
On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known,
     solemn repetitions of history.

A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from
     your kindliness of bronze,
You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple,
     silent;
Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and
     women
Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil,
     the salt of tears,
And blood drops of undiminishing war.

LET me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord.
Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool,
        on a child.
To-day, let me be monosyllabic ... a crony of old men
        who wash sunlight in their fingers and
        enjoy slow-pacing clocks.

The monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.

     The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.

     A face I know is beautiful--
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And the peace of long warm rain.

LEAVES of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.
      The moon's good-by ends pictures.
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
      Only dark listening to dark.

Twenty men stand watching the muckers.
          Stabbing the sides of the ditch
          Where clay gleams yellow,
          Driving the blades of their shovels
          Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains
          Wiping sweat off their faces
               With red bandanas
The muckers work on... pausing... to pull
Their boots out of suckholes where they slosh.

     Of the twenty looking on
Ten murmer, "O, its a hell of a job,"
Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job."

[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two
     days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]

Come to me only with playthings now...
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers...
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world...

No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet...
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses...
And the world was all playthings.

MY people are gray,
  pigeon gray, dawn gray, storm gray.
I call them beautiful,
  and I wonder where they are going.

THIRTY-TWO Greeks are dipping their feet in a creek.
Sloshing their bare feet in a cool flow of clear water.
All one midsummer day ten hours the Greeks
        stand in leather shoes shoveling gravel.
Now they hold their toes and ankles
        to the drift of running water.
Then they go to the bunk cars
        and eat mulligan and prune sauce,
Smoke one or two pipefuls, look at the stars,
        tell ****** stories
About men and women they have known,
        countries they have seen,
Railroads they have built-
        and then the deep sleep of children.

ON Forty First Street
near Eighth Avenue
a frame house wobbles.
  
If houses went on crutches
this house would be
one of the cripples.
  
A sign on the house:
Church of the Living God
And Rescue Home for Orphan Children.
  
From a Greek coffee house
Across the street
A cabalistic jargon
Jabbers back.
  And men at tables
  Spill Peloponnesian syllables
  And speak of shovels for street work.
  And the new embankments of the Erie Railroad
  At Painted Post, Horse's Head, Salamanca.

THE TIME has gone by.
The child is dead.
The child was never even born.
Why go on? Why so much as begin?
How can we turn the clock back now
And not laugh at each other
As ashes laugh at ashes?