Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Honey and Salt

Pass, Friend

Alone and Not Alone

Wingtip

Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely

Almanac

Biography

Anecdote of Hemlock for Two Athenians

Dreaming Fool

Lief the Lucky

Bird Footprint

Cahokia

Buyers and Sellers

City Number

Chromo

The Evening Sunsets Witness and Pass On

Deep Sea Wandering

Call the Next Witness

Early Copper

Atlas, How Have You Been?

Cheap Rent

Elm Buds

Child Face

Fog Numbers

Evening Questions

Fifty-Fifty

Evening Sea Wind

Forgotten Wars

God Is No Gentleman

Hunger and Cold

Foxgloves

Harvest

Fame If Not Fortune

Impasse

Is Wisdom a Lot of Language?

Keepsake Boxes

Impossible Iambics

Lackawanna Twilight

If So Hap May Be

Kisses, Can You Come Back Like Ghosts?

Lake Michigan Morning

New Weather

Lesson

Metamorphosis

Love Beyond Keeping

Moods

Moon Rondeau

Little Word, Little White Bird

Offering and Rebuff

Morning Glory Blue

High Moments

Mummy

Old Hokusai Print

One Parting

Ever a Seeker

Old Music for Quiet Hearts

Personalia

The Gong of Time

Prairie Woodland

Shadows Fall Blue on the Mountains

Quotations

Skyscrapers Stand Proud

Pool of Bethesda

First Sonata for Karlen Paula

Thou Art Like a Flower

Solo for Saturday Night Guitar

Rose Bawn

Speech

Runaway Colors

Out of the Rainbow End

Sun Dancer

Themes in Contrast

Two Fish

Smoke Shapes

Three Shrines

Variations on a Theme

Timesweep

About the Author

Copyright 1953, © 1958, 1960, 1961, 1963 by Carl Sandburg

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information, storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0-15-642165-8 (Harvest/HBJ pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-544-41693-2

v1.0215

Honey and Salt

A bag of tricks—is it?

And a game smoothies play?

If you’re good with a deck of cards

or rolling the bones—that helps?

If you can tell jokes and be a chum

and make an impression—that helps?

When boy meets girl or girl meets boy—

what helps?

They all help: be cozy but not too cozy:

be shy, bashful, mysterious, yet only so-so:

then forget everything you ever heard about love

for it’s a summer tan and a winter windburn

and it comes as weather comes and you can’t change it:

it comes like your face came to you, like your legs came

and the way you walk, talk, hold your head and hands—

and nothing can be done about it—you wait and pray.

Is there any way of measuring love?

Yes but not till long afterward

when the beat of your heart has gone

many miles, far into the big numbers.

Is the key to love in passion, knowledge, affection?

All three—along with moonlight, roses, groceries,

givings and forgivings, gettings and forgettings,

keepsakes and room rent,

pearls of memory along with ham and eggs.

Can love be locked away and kept hid?

Yes and it gathers dust and mildew

and shrivels itself in shadows

unless it learns the sun can help,

snow, rain, storms can help—

birds in their one-room family nests

shaken by winds cruel and crazy—

they can all help:

lock not away your love nor keep it hid.

How comes the first sign of love?

In a chill, in a personal sweat,

in a you-and-me, us, us two,

In a couple of answers,

an amethyst haze on the horizon,

two dance programs criss-crossed,

jackknifed initials interwoven,

five fresh violets lost in sea salt,

birds flying at single big moments

in and out a thousand windows,

a horse, two horses, many horses,

a silver ring, a brass cry,

a golden gong going ong ong ong-ng-ng,

pink doors closing one by one

to sunset nightsongs along the west,

shafts and handles of stars,

folds of moonmist curtains,

winding and unwinding wips of fogmist.

How long does love last?

As long as glass bubbles handled with care

or two hot-house orchids in a blizzard

or one solid immovable steel anvil

tempered in sure inexorable welding—

or again love might last as

six snowflakes, six hexagonal snowflakes,

six floating hexagonal flakes of snow

or the oaths between hydrogen and oxygen

in one cup of spring water

or the eyes of bucks and does

or two wishes riding on the back of a

morning wind in winter

or one corner of an ancient tabernacle

held sacred for personal devotions

or dust   yes   dust in a little solemn heap

played on by changing winds.

There are sanctuaries

holding honey and salt.

There are those who

spill and spend.

There are those who

search and save.

And love may be a quest

with silence and content.

Can you buy love?

Sure   every day with money, clothes, candy,

with promises, flowers, big-talk,

with laughter, sweet-talk, lies,

every day men and women buy love

and take it away and things happen

and they study about it

and the longer they look at it

the more it isn’t love they bought at all:

bought love is a guaranteed imitation.

Can you sell love?

Yes you can sell it and take the price

and think it over

and look again at the price

and cry and cry to yourself

and wonder who was selling what and why.

Evensong lights floating black night waters,

a lagoon of stars washed in velvet shadows,

a great storm cry from white sea-horses—

these moments cost beyond all prices.

Bidden or unbidden? how comes love?

Both bidden and unbidden, a sneak and a shadow,

a dawn in a doorway throwing a dazzle

or a sash of light in a blue fog,

a slow blinking of two red lanterns in river mist

or a deep smoke winding one hump of a mountain

and the smoke becomes a smoke known to your own

twisted individual garments:

the winding of it gets into your walk, your hands,

your face and eyes.

Pass, Friend

The doors of the morning must open.

The keys of the night are not thrown away.

I who have loved morning know its doors.

I who have loved night know its keys.

Alone and Not Alone

I

There must be a place

a room and a sanctuary

set apart for silence

for shadows and roses

holding aware in walls

the sea and its secrets

gong clamor gone still

in a long deep sea-wash

aware always of gongs

vanishing before shadows

of roses repeating themes

of ferns standing still

till wind blows over them:

great hunger may bring these

into one little room

set apart for silence

II

There must be substance here

related to old communions of

hungering men and women—

brass is a hard lean metal

gold is the most ductile metal—

they speak to each other not often

they melt and fuse

only in the crucible of this communion

only in the dangers of high moments—

they moan as mist before wind

III

The shuttlings of dawn color go soft

weaving out of the night of black ice

with crimson ramblers

up the latticed ladders of daytime arriving.

The riders of the sea     the long white horses

they send their plungers obedient to the moon

in a dedicated path of foam and rainbows.

The praise of any slow red moonrise should be

slow.

There are storm winds who bow down to

nothing.

They go on relentless under command and

release

sent out to do their hammering whirls of storm.

There are sunset flames inviting prayer and

sharing.

There are time pieces having silence between

chimes.

Children of the wind keep their childish ways.

The wisps of blue in a smoke wreath are mortal.

The keepers of wisdom testify a heap of ashes

means whatever was there went out burning.

Wingtip

The birds—are they worth remembering?

Is flight a wonder and one wingtip a

space marvel?

When will man know what birds know?

Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely

love is a deep and a dark and a lonely

and you take it deep take it dark

and take it with a lonely winding

and when the winding gets too lonely

then may come the windflowers

and the breath of wind over many flowers

winding its way out of many lonely flowers

waiting in rainleaf whispers

waiting in dry stalks of noon

wanting in a music of windbreaths

so you can take love as it comes keening

as it comes with a voice and a face

and you make a talk of it

talking to yourself a talk worth keeping

and you put it away for a keen keeping

and you find it to be a hoarding

and you give it away and yet it stays hoarded

like a book read over and over again

like one book being a long row of books

like leaves of windflowers bending low

and bending to be never broken

Almanac

Scrutinize the Scorpion constellation

and see where a hook of stars

ends with a lonely star.

Go to the grey sea horizon

and ask for a message

and listen and wait.

See whether the conundrums

of a heavy land fog

either sing or talk.

Let only a small cry come

in behalf of a clean sunrise:

the sun performs so often.

Speak to the branches of spring

and the surprise of blossoms:

they too hope for a good year.

Search the first winter snowstorm

for a symphonic arrangement:

it is always there.

Take an alphabet of gold or mud and spell

as you wish any words: kiss me, kill me,

love, hate, ice, thought, victory.

Read the numbers on your wrist watch

and ask: is being born, being loved,

being dead, nothing but numbers?

Biography

A biography, sirs, should begin—with the breath of a

man

when his eyes first meet the light of day—then working

on

through to the death when the light of day is gone:

so the biography then is finished—unless you reverse

the order

and begin with the death and work back to the birth—

starting the life with a coffin, moving back to a cradle—

in which case, sirs, the biography has arrived, is

completed

when you have your subject born, except for ancestry,

lineage,

forbears, pedigree, blood, breed, bones, backgrounds—

and these, sirs, may be carried far.

Anecdote of Hemlock for Two Athenians

The grizzled Athenian ordered to hemlock,

Ordered to a drink and lights out,

Had a friend he never refused anything.

“Let me drink too,” the friend said.

And the grizzled Athenian answered,

“I never yet refused you anything.”

“I am short of hemlock enough for two,”

The head executioner interjected,

“There must be more silver for more hemlock.”

“Somebody pay this man for the drinks of death.”

The grizzled Athenian told his friends.

Who fished out the ready cash wanted.

“Since one cannot die on free cost at Athens,

Give this man his money,” were the words

Of the man named Phocion, the grizzled Athenian.

Yes, there are men who know how to die in a grand way.

There are men who make their finish worth mentioning.

Dreaming Fool

I was the first of the fools

(So I dreamed)

And all the fools of the world

were put into me and I was

the biggest fool of all.

Others were fools in the morning

Or in the evening or on Saturdays

Or odd days like Friday the Thirteenth

But me—I was a fool every day in the week

And when asleep I was the sleeping fool.

(So I dreamed.)

Lief the Lucky

Lief Ericson crossed the sea

to get away from a woman—

did he?

I have looked deep into the cisterns of the stars—

said Lief—and the stars too, every one was a struggler.

My neck shall not be broken without a little battle—

said Lief—and I shall always sing a little in tough weather.

I hunted alligators on the moon and they had excellent teeth for grinding even as the camels had excellent humps for humping—so ran one of his dreams.

He told the crew of a souse who said, Get me drunk and have some fun with me—and his mood changed and he told them it would be grand to travel the sky in a chariot of fire like Elijah.

He saw a soft milk white horse on the, top cone of an iceberg looking for a place to slide down to pearl purple sea foam—and he murmured, “I’ve been lonely too, though never so lonely one wind wouldn’t take me home to the four winds.”

He went on murmuring, “Never have I known time to fail me, time with its monotonous mumbling in the masts and stanchions, its plashing plashing measuring plashing to the bulwarks, the slinking of the sea after a storm, the crying of the birds as they ride the wind when the wind goes down.”

He lifted his head toward scrawny warning horizons and nailed up a slogan: Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed:

Yes Lief Ericson crossed the sea

to get away from a woman—

perhaps—maybe.

Bird Footprint

The footprint of a bird in sand brought your face.

I said, “What of it?”

And the next lone footprint of a bird in the sand

brought your face again.

I said, “It is written deeper than sand.”

I saw a bird wing fixed forty thousand years in a rock,

a bird wing bringing your foot, your wrist.

Cahokia

The Indian saw the butterfly

rise out of the cocoon.

That was enough for him.

The butterfly had wings, freedom.

The Indian saw flowers in spring

push up out of the ground.

He saw the rain and the thunder.

They were enough for him.

And he saw the sun.

But he didn’t worship the sun.

For him the sun was a sign, a symbol.

He bowed in prayer to what was behind the sun.

He made songs and dances to the makers and movers

of the sun.

Buyers and Sellers

What is a man worth?

What can he do?

What is his value?

On the one hand those who buy labor,

On the other hand those who have nothing

to sell but their labor.

And when the buyers of labor tell the

sellers, “Nothing doing today, not a

chance!”—then what?

City Number

The soiled city oblongs stand sprawling.

The blocks and house numbers go miles.

Trucks howl rushing the early morning editions.

Night-club dancers have done their main floor show.

Tavern trios improvise “Show me the way to go home.”

Soldiers and sailors look for street corners, house

numbers.

Night watchmen figure halfway between midnight and

breakfast.

Look out the window now late after the evening that

was.

On a south sky of pigeon-egg blue

Long clouds float in a silver moonbath.

Chromo

This old river town saw the

early steamboats.

The line of wharf and houses

is a faded chromo.

It is bleached and bitten standing

to steady sunrises.

The Evening Sunsets Witness and Pass On

Passion may call for a partner

to share the music of its bones,

to weave shadows, rain, moonshine, dreams—

Passion may hammer on hard door panels,

empty a hot vocabulary of wanting, wanting—

it is all there in the fragments of Sappho.

Passion may consider poppies cheap

with their strong stalks in the wind,

with their crying crimson sheaths—

Passion may remember tiger lilies,

keepers of a creeping evening mist,

tawny watchers of the morning stars—

Passion may cry to the moon

for miracles of flesh,

for red answers to a white riddle—

it is told in the tears on many love letters.

Passion may spend its money,

its youth; its laughter, all else,

till again passion is alone

spending its cries to the moon—

and some weep, some sing, some go to war.

Passion may be alone at a window

seeking kisses fasten lips in wild troths,

a storm of red silk scarfs in a high wind,

armfuls of redbirds let loose into bush and sky—

and some weep, some sing, some go to war.

Passion may come with baskets

throwing paths of red rain flowers,

each folded petal a sacrament—

the evening sunsets witness and pass on.

Passion may build itself bouses of air

and look from a thousand tall windows—

till the wind rides and gathers.

Passion may be a wind child

transient and made of air—

Passion may be a wild grass

where a great wind came and went.

The evening sunsets witness and pass on.

Deep Sea Wandering

deep sea was the wandering

deep brass the dripping loot

deep crimson the bloodspill

lyrics begotten on lush lips

and many a hawser they saw

rotting rope and rusting chain

and anchors   many lost anchors

Call the Next Witness

there will be people left over

enough inhabitants among the Eskimos

among jungle folk

denizens of plains and plateaus

cities and towns synthetic miasma missed

enough for a census

enough to call it still a world

though definitely    my friends    my good friends

definitely not the same old world

the vanquished saying, “What happened?”

the victors saying, “We planned it so.”

if it should be at the end

in the smoke    the mist    the silence of the end

if it should be one side lost    the other side won

the changes among these leftover people

the scattered ones the miasma missed

their programs of living    their books and music

they will be simple and conclusive

in the ways and manners of early men and women

the children having playroom

rulers and diplomats finding affairs less complex

new types of cripples here and there

and indescribable babbling survivors

listening to plain scholars saying,

should a few plain scholars have come through,

“As after other wars the peace is something else again.”

amid the devastated areas and the untouched

the historians will take an interest

finding amid the ruins and shambles

tokens of contrast and surprise

testimonies here curious    there monstrous

nuclear-fission corpses having one face

radioactivity cadavers another look

bacteriological victims not unfamiliar

scenes and outlooks nevertheless surpassing

those of the First World War

and those of the Second or Global War

—the historians will take an interest

fill their note-books    pick their way

amid burned and tattered documents

and say to each other,

“What the hell! it isn’t worth writing,

posterity won’t give a damn what we write.”

Early Copper

A slim and singing copper girl,

They lived next to the earth for her sake

And the yellow corn was in their faces

And the copper curve of prairie sunset.

In her April eyes bringing

Corn tassels shining from Duluth and Itasca,

From La Crosse to Keokuk and St. Louis, to the Big

Muddy,

The yellow-hoofed Big Muddy meeting the Father of

Waters,

In her eyes cornrows running to the prairie ends,

In her eyes copper men living next to the earth for her

sake.

Atlas, How Have You Been?

The shape of the world is either a box or a bag

and a box-shaped world has comers

and a bag-shaped world is either open or closed,

and Somebody holds the bag.

Now whether the world is oblong, square or rhomboid

or whether the world is a series of circles,

rings twisted into each other’s eternal grooves,

or whether the world keeps changing from box to bag,

from corners to circles and back to corners,

from rings to oblongs and back to rings

and repeating the twist into the groove

and practicing that twist over again

from box to bag and bag again to box—

this was what we were talking about

when the first thunder crashed

and lightning forked across a black rain.

We decided the earth itself isn’t much.

It is mapped and measured now

And we fly around it in just a few breakfasts.

And the strong man they named Atlas

Should have had that very name of Atlas

If he had stood under the earth ball

And held it on his big shoulders;

Atlas, you were made as a make-believe

And we give you a make-believe salute.

We say: Atlas, how are you doing,

how have you been?

Beyond the ball of earth are other balls,

also double balls, triple balls, series of balls,

and balloons, drums, cylinders, triangles, jugs,

some with handles identified and signed,

others with anonymous sprockets and axles—

and we decided amid the sheet lightning—

the whole works is held either in a box or a bag,

afterwards asking ourselves:

what is outside the box, what props up the bag?

these are big questions, we told each other

while sprags of lightning dropped from the sky—

clutches and magnets, clocks and wheels

made of a mud and air beyond our dreams,

ordered in verbs beyond our doorways.

We decided at last

the world might be a box when awake

and a bag when asleep

and while we slept

it changed from box to bag

and back from bag to box

and the forgetfulness of our own sleep

is strange and beautiful by itself

and sometimes in its shifting shapes

the world is a cradle dedicated to sleep

and what would you rather have than sleep?

Cheap Rent

The laws of the bronze gods

are irrevocable.

And yet—in the statue of

General Grant astride a horse

on rolling prairie, on little

hills looking from Lincoln

Park at Lake Michigan—

here the sparrows have a nest

in General Grant’s spy glass—

here the sparrows have rented

a flat in General Grant’s

right stirrup—

It is true? The laws of the

bronze gods are irrevocable?

Elm Buds

Elm buds are out.

Yesterday morning, last night,

they crept out.

They are the mice of early

spring air.

To the north is the gray sky.

Winter hung it gray for the gray

elm to stand dark against.

Now the branches all end with the

yellow and gold mice of early

spring air.

They are moving mice creeping out

with leaf and leaf.

Child Face

There are lips as strange and soft

As a rim of moon many miles off.

White on a fading purple sea.

“Was it there, far-off, real,

Or did my eyes play me a trick?”

A finger can be laid across it,

Laid on a little mouth’s white yearning,

Only as a white rim of moon

Can be picked off a blue sea

And sent in a love letter.

Once a child face lay in the moonight

Of an early spring night.

Fog Numbers

Birth is the starting point of passion.

Passion is the beginning of death.

How can you turn back from birth?

How can you say no to passion?

How can you bid death hold off?

And if thoughts come and hold you

And if dreams step in and shake your bones

What can you do but take them and make them

more your own?

Of course, a nickel is a nickel,

and a dime is a dime—sure—

we learned that—

why mention it now?

of course, steel is steel;

and a hammer is a hammer;

And a thought, a dream, is more than a name,

a number, a fixed point.

***

Walk in a midnight fog now and say to it: Tell

me your number and I’ll tell mine.

Salute one morning sun falling on a river ribbon

of mist and tell it: My number is such-and-

such—what’s yours?

Of what is fog the starting point?

Of what is the red sun the beginning?

Long ago—as now—little men and women knew in

their bones the singing and the aching of

these stumbling questions.

Evening Questions

The swath of light climbs up the skyscraper

Around the corners of white prisms and spikes.

The inside torso stands up in a plug of gun-metal.

The shadow struggles to get loose from the light.

Shall I say I’m through and it’s no use?

Or have I got another good fight in me?

Fifty-Fifty

What is there for us two

to split fifty-fifty,

to go halvers on?

A Bible, a deck of cards?

a farm, a frying pan?

a porch, front steps to sit on?

How can we be pals

when you speak English

and I speak English

and you never understand me

and I never understand you?

Evening Sea Wind

A molten gold flows away from the sun

to fall as a shingle of gold and glass

on waters holding five ships, a quintet,

five, no less, five sheathed in brass haze.

On a bronze and copper path just over

comes a maroon, comes a dusk of gun-metal.

A white horse shape of a moving cloud

meets a wind changing it to a small lamb,

meets a wind smoothing what it meets,

smoothing the lamb into six white snakes,

smoothing the snakes to a ball of wool.

The sungold shingle, ships in brass haze

fade into walls of umber, pools of ink

and there is abbadabra and abracadabra.

Two smoke rings, two nightmist bracelets

seem to be telling us and themselves:

“We blend and go, then again

blend and go.”

Forgotten Wars

Be loose. Be easy. Be ready.

Forget the last war.

Forget the one before.

Forget the one yet to come.

Be loose and easy about the wars

whether they have been fought

or whether yet to be fought—

be ready to forget them.

Who was saying at high noon today:

“Is not each of them a forgotten war

after it is fought and over?

how and why it came forgotten?

how and what it cost forgotten?”

and was he there at Iwo Jima, Okinawa

or places named Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge?

and saying now:

“Let the next war before it comes

and before it gets under way

and five or six days sees its finish

or fifty years sees it still going strong

—let it be now a forgotten war.

Be ready now to forget it.

Be loose, be easy now.

The next war goes over in a flash—or runs long.”

God Is No Gentleman

God gets up in the morning

and says, “Another day?”

God goes to work every day

at regular hours.

God is no gentleman for God

puts on overalls and gets

dirty running the universe we know

about and several other universes

nobody knows about but Him.

Hunger and Cold

Hunger long gone holds little heroic

to the hungering.

You don’t eat and you get so you don’t

care to eat nor ever remember eating—

and hearing of people who eat or don’t

eat is all the same to you when you’ve

learned to keep your mind off eating

and eaters.

You become with enough hunger

the same as a tree with sap long gone

or a dry leaf ready to fall.

Cold is cold and too cold is too cold.

The colder you get the more numb you get

and when you get numb enough you begin

to feel snug and cozy with warmth.

When the final numb glow of comfort goes

through you, then comes your slow smooth

slide into being frozen stiff and stark.

Then comes your easy entry at the tall

gates beyond which you are proof against

ice or fire

or tongues of malice

or itch of ambition

or any phase of the peculiar torment known

as unrequited love.

Foxgloves

Your heart was handed over

to the foxgloves one hot summer afternoon.

The snowsilk buds nodded and hung drowsy.

So the stalks believed

As they held those buds above.

In deep wells of white

The dark fox fingers go in these gloves.

In a slow fold of summer

Your heart was handed over in a curve

from bud to bloom.

Harvest

When the corn stands yellow in September,

A red flower ripens and shines among the stalks

And a red silk creeps among the broad ears

And tall tassels lift over all else

and keep a singing

to the prairies

and the wind.

They are the grand lone ones

For they are never saved

along with the corn:

They are cut down

and piled high

and burned.

Their fire

lights the west in November.

Fame If Not Fortune

A half-dollar in the hand of a gypsy

tells me this and more:

You shall go broken on the wheel,

lashed to the bars and fates of steel,

a nickel’s worth of nothing,

a vaudeville gag,

a child’s busted rubber balloon kicked

amid dirty bunting and empty popcorn

bags at a summer park.

Yet cigarmakers shall name choice Havanas and

paste your picture on the box,

Racehorses foaming under scarlet and ochre jockeys

shall wear your name,

And policemen direct strangers to parks and schools

remembered after you.

Impasse

Bring on a pail of smoke.

Bring on a sieve of coffee.

Bring on shovels speaking Javanese.

Open your newest, latest handkerchief

And let down a red-mouthed hankering hippopotamus.

Perform for us these offertories in blue.

Tell us again: Nothing is impossible.

We listen while you tell us.

Is Wisdom a Lot of Language?

Apes, may I speak to you a moment?

Chimpanzees, come hither for words.

Orangoutangs, let’s get into a huddle.

Baboons, lemme whisper in your ears.

Gorillas, do yuh hear me hollerin’ to yuh?

And monkeys! monkeys! get this chatter—

For a long time men have plucked letters

Out of the air and shaped syllables.

And out of the syllables came words

And from the words came phrases, clauses.

Sentences were born—and languages.

(The Tower of Babel didn’t work out—

it came down quicker than it went up.)

Misunderstandings followed the languages,

Arguments, epithets, maledictions, curses,

Gossip, backbiting, the buzz of the bazoo,

Chit chat, blah blah, talk just to be talking,

Monologues of members telling other members

How good they are now and were yesterday,

Conversations missing the point,

Dialogues seldom as beautiful as soliloquies,

Seldom as fine as a man alone, a woman by herself

Telling a clock, “I’m a plain damn fool.”

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.

Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.

See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

Keepsake Boxes

Now we shall open boxes and look.

In this one a storm was locked up, hoarse

from long howling.

In this one lay fair weather, a blue sky

manuscript.

In this one unfolded a gray monotone of

a fog afternoon.

In each box was a day and its story of

air and wind.

Sometimes one shook with confusions,

processionals of weather.

“One day may be too much to gather, consider,

and look among keepsakes.”

***

***

Impossible Iambics

He saw a fire dancer take two flambeaus

And do red shadows with her shoulders.

And he met two fools looking on and saying

Horsefeathers horsefeathers, and he said

I must bethink myself, I must throw seven

Eleven, O God am I a two-spot or what am

I? a who or a what or a which am I?

And the next day it rained,

the next day was something

else again.

Well, hibiscus, what would you?

The flambeau dancer did it,

she and the red shadows she threw.

Lackawanna Twilight

Twilight and little mountain

towns along the Lehigh, sundown

and grey lavender flush.

Miners with dinner buckets and

headlamps, state constabulary on

horses, guns in holsters, Scranton,

Wilkesbarre, the Lackawanna Trail.

Twilight and the blessed armistice

of late afternoon and early evening.

Twilight and the sport sheets, movies,

chain programs, magazines, comics,

revival meetings.

Twilight and headlights on the new

hard roads, boy friend and girl friend,

dreams, romance, bread, wages, babies,

homes.

If So Hap May Be

Be somber with those in smoke garments.

Laugh with those eating bitter weeds.

Burn your love with bold flame blossoms,

if so hap may be.

Leave him with a soft snowfall memory,

if so hap may be.

***

Never came winter stars more clear

yet the stars lost themselves

midnight came snow-wrought snow-blown.

***

Kisses, Can You Come Back Like Ghosts?

If we ask you to gleam through the tears,

Kisses, can you came back like ghosts?

Today, tomorrow, the gateways take them.

“Always some door eats my shadow.”

Love is a clock and the works wear out.

Love is a violin and the wood rots.

Love is a day with night at the end.

Love is a summer with falltime after.

Love dies always and when it dies it is dead

And when it is dead there is nothing more to it

And when there is nothing more to it then we say

This is the end, it comes always, it came to us.

And now we will bury it and put it away

Beautifully and decently, like a clock or a violin,

Like a summer day near fall time,

Like any lovely thing brought to the expected end.

Yes, let it go at that.

The clock rang and we answered.

The moon swept an old valley.

And we counted all of its rings.

The water-birds flipped in the river

And flicked their wing-points in sunset gold.

To the moon and the river water-birds,

To these we answered as the high calls rang.

And now? Now we take the clock and put it away.

Now we count again the rings of the valley moon

and put them away as keepsakes.

Now we count the river-birds once more and let

them slip loose and slip up the valley curve.

This is the end, there is always an end.

Kisses, can you

come back

like ghosts?

Lake Michigan Morning

Blue and white came out,

Riders of an early fall morning,

The blue by itself, the white by itself.

A young lamb white

crossed on a clear water blue.

Blue rollers talked on a beach white sand.

Water blown from snowwhite mountains

met the blue rise of lowland waters.

This was an early morning of high price.

Blue bowls of white water

Poured themselves into white bowls of blue water.

There was a back-and-forth and a kiss-me kill-me

washing and weaving.

New Weather

Mist came up as a man’s hand.

Fog lifted as a woman’s shawl.

Fair weather rode in with a blue oath.

One large cloud bellied in a white wind.

Two new winds joined for weather.

Splinters of rain broke out of the west.

Blue rains soaked in a lowland loam.

The dahlia leaves are points of red.

Bees roam singing in the buckwheat.

Russet and gold are the wheatstraws.

Forgotten bells fade and change.

Forgetful bells fill the air.

Fog shawls and mist hands come again.

New weather weaves new garments.

Lesson

In early April the trees

end their winter waiting

with a creep of green on branches.

***

***

In early October the trees

listen for a wind crying,

for leaves whirling.

***

***

The face of the river by night

holds a scatter of stars

and the silence of summer blossoms

falling to the moving water.

***

***

Come clean with a child heart.

Laugh as peaches in the summer wind.

Let rain on a house roof be a song.

Let the writing on your face

be a smell of apple orchards in late June.

Metamorphosis

When water turns ice does it remember

one time it was water?

When ice turns back into water does it

remember it was ice?

Love Beyond Keeping

She had a box

with a million red silk bandannas for him.

She gave them to him

one by one or by thousands,

saying then she had not enough for him.

She had languages and landscapes

on her lips and the end of her tongue,

landscapes of sunny hills and changing fogs,

of houses falling and people within falling,

of a left-handed man

who died for a woman who went out of her mind,

of a guitar player

who died with fingers reaching for strings,

of a man whose heart stopped

as his hand went out to put a pawn forward

on the fifth day of one game of chess,

of five gay women

stricken and lost

amid the javelins and chants

of love beyond keeping.

Moods

The same gold of summer was on the winter hills,

the oat straw gold, the gold of slow sun change.

The stubble was chilly and lonesome,

the stub feet clomb up the hills and stood.

The flat cry of one wheeling crow faded and came,

ran on the stub gold flats and faded and came.

Fade-me, find-me, slow lights rang their changes

on the flats of oat straw gold on winter hills.

***

***

Use your skypiece.

Let the works of your noggin run.

Try one way, try another, throw away

and throw away, junk your first,

your second, junk sixty-six.

Keep your skypiece going, your noggin

running, sit with your eyes shut

and your thumbs quiet as two

sleeping mice.

Moon Rondeau

“Love is a door we shall open together.”

So they told each other under the moon

One evening when the smell of leaf mould

And the beginnings of roses and potatoes

Came on a wind.

Late in the hours of that evening

They looked long at the moon and called it

A silver button, a copper coin, a bronze wafer,

A plaque of gold, a vanished diadem,

A brass hat dripping from deep waters.

“People like us,

us two,

We own the moon.”

Little Word, Little White Bird

Love, is it a cat with claws and wild mate screams

in the black night?

Love, is it a bird—a goldfinch with a burnish

on its wingtips or a little gray sparrow

picking crumbs, hunting crumbs?

Love, is it a tug at the heart that comes high and

costs, always costs, as long as you have it?

Love, is it a free glad spender, ready to spend to

the limit, and then go head over heels in debt?

Love, can it hit one without hitting two and leave

the one lost and groping?

Love, can you pick it up like a mouse and put it in

your pocket and take it to your room and bring it

out of your pocket and say,

O here is my love,

my little pretty mousey love?

***

***

Yes—love, this little word you hear about,

is love an elephant and you step out of the way

where the elephant comes trampling, tromping,

traveling with big feet and long flaps of

drooping ears and straight white ivory tusks—

and you step out of the way with respect,

with high respect, and surprise near to shock

as you say,

Dear God, he’s big,

big like stupendous is big,

heavy and elephantine and funny,

immense and slow and easy.

I’m asking, is love an elephant?

Or could it be love is a snake—like a rattlesnake,

like a creeping winding slithering rattlesnake

with fangs—poison fangs they tell me,

and when the bite of it gets you

then you run crying for help

if you don’t fall cold and dead on the way.

Can love be a snake?

Or would you say love is a flamingo, with pink

feathers—

a soft sunset pink, a sweet gleaming naked

pink—

and with enough long pink feathers

you could make the fan for a fan dance

and hear a girl telling her lover,

Speak, my chosen one,

and give me your wish

as to what manner of fan dance

you would have from me

in the cool of evening

or the black velvet sheen of midnight.

Could it be love is a flamingo?

Or is love a big red apple, and you don’t know

whether to bite into it—and you knock on wood

and call off your luck numbers and hold your

breath—

and you put your teeth into it and get a

mouthful,

tasting all there is to it,

and whether it’s sweet and wild

or a dry mush you want to spit out,

it’s something else than you expected.

I’m asking, sir, is love a big red apple?

Or maybe love is goofer dust, I hadn’t thought

about that—

for you go to the goofer tree at midnight

and gather the leaves and crush them into fine

dust,

very fine dust, sir, and when your man sleeps

you sprinkle it in his shoes and he’s helpless

and from then on he can’t get away from you,

he’s snared and tangled and can’t keep from

loving you.

Could goofer dust be the answer?

And I’ve heard some say love is a spy and a

sneak,

a blatherer, a gabby mouth,

tattling and tittering as it tattles,

and you believe it and take it to your heart

and nurse it like good news,

like heaven-sent news meant for you

and you only—precious little you.

Have you heard love comes creeping and cheating

like that?

***

***

And are they after beguiling and befoozling us

when they tell us love is a rose, a red red rose,

the mystery of leaves folded over and under

and you can take it to pieces and throw it away

petal by petal into the wind blowing it away

or you can wear it for a soft spot of crimson

in your hair, at your breast,

and you can waltz and tango wearing your sweet

crimson rose

and take it home and lay it on a window sill and see it

wither brown, curl black, and shrivel

until one day you’re not careful

and it crackles into dust in your hand

and the wind whisks it whither you know not,

whither you care not,

for it is just one more flame of a rose

that came with its red blush and crimson bloom

and did the best it could with what it had

and nobody wins, nobody loses,

and what’s one more rose

when on any street corner

in bright summer mornings

you see them with bunches of roses,

their hands out toward you calling,

Roses today, fresh roses,

fresh-cut roses today

a rose for you sir,

the ladies like roses,

now is the time,

fresh roses sir.

And I’m waiting—for days and weeks and months

I’ve been waiting to see some flower seller,

one of those hawkers of roses,

I’ve been waiting to hear one of them calling,

A cabbage with every rose,

a good sweet cabbage with every rose,

a head of cabbage for soup or slaw or stew,

cabbage with the leaves folded over

and under like a miracle

and you can eat it and stand up and walk,

today and today only your last chance

a head of cabbage with every single lovely rose.

And any time and any day I hear a flower seller so calling

I shall be quick and I shall buy

two roses and two cabbages,

the roses for my lover

and the cabbages for little luckless me.

Or am I wrong—is love a rose you can buy and give away and keep for yourself cabbages, my lord and master, cabbages, kind sir?

I am asking, can you?

And it won’t help any, it won’t get us anywhere,

it won’t wipe away what has been

nor hold off what is to be,

if you hear me saying

love is a little white bird

and the flight of it so fast

you can’t see it

and you know it’s there

only by the faint whirr of its wings

and the hush song coming so low to your ears

you fear it might be silence

and you listen keen and you listen long

and you know it’s more than silence

for you get the hush song so lovely

it hurts and cuts into your heart

and what you want is to give more than you can get

and you’d like to write it but it can’t be written

and you’d like to sing it but you don’t dare try

because the little white bird sings it better than you can

so you listen and while you listen you pray

and after you pray you meditate, then pray more

and one day it’s as though a great slow wind

had washed you clean and strong inside and out

and another day it’s as though you had gone to sleep

in an early afternoon sunfall and your sleeping heart

dumb and cold as a round polished stone,

and the little white bird’s hush song

telling you nothing can harm you,

the days to come can weave in and weave out

and spin their fabrics and designs for you

and nothing can harm you—

unless you change yourself into a thing of harm

nothing can harm you.

***

***

The little white bird is my candidate.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you

the little white bird you can’t see

though you can hear its hush song

and when you hear that hush song it’s love

and I’m ready to swear to it—

you can bring in a stack of affidavits

and I’ll swear to it and sign my name

to every last one, so help me God.

And if a fat bumbling shopworn court clerk tells me,

Hold up your hand, I’ll hold up my hand all right

and when he bumbles and mumbles to me like I was

one more witness it was work for him to give the oath to,

when he blabs, You do solemnly swear so help you God

that in this cause you will tell the truth,

the whole truth and nothing but the truth,

I ’ll say to him, I do, and I ’ll say to myself,

And no thanks to you and you could be more

immaculate

with the name of God.

I am done.

I have finished.

I give you the little white bird—

and my thanks for your hearing me—

and my prayers for you,

my deep silent prayers.

Offering and Rebuff

I could love you

as dry roots love rain.

I could hold you

as branches in the wind

brandish petals.

Forgive me for speaking

so soon.

***

***

Let your heart look

on white sea spray

and be lonely.

Love is a fool star.

You and a ring of stars

may mention my name

and then forget me.

Love is a fool star.

Morning Glory Blue

The blue of morning glory climbs fences and houses.

It is a Gettysburg Union blue setting itself against

a morning haze.

The blue of morning glory spots and spatters a rail

fence.

The fence zigzags and the morning glory staggers on

a path of sea-blue, sky-blue, Gettysburg Union blue.

High Moments

Keep this flower to remember me by.

So she told him.

Keep this, remember me, remember.

Fold this flower where you never forget.

Put me by where time no longer counts.

Then come back to a sure remembering.

Night itself, night is one long dark flower.

She said night knows deep rememberings,

All flowers being some kind of remembering

And night itself folding up like

many smooth dark flowers.

Find me like the night finds.

She measured herself so.

Keep me like the night keeps

For I have night deeps in me.

Flesh is a doom and a prison.

Flesh jails those only flesh.

Air speaks nevertheless,

spray,   fire,   air,

thin voices beyond capture

save only in remembering

the luster of lost stars,

the reach for a wafer of moon.

Let us talk it over long

and wear cream gold buttons

and be proud we have anger and pride together,

remembering high loveliness hovers in time

and is made of passing moments.

I have kept high moments.

They go round and round in me.

Mummy

Blood is blood and bone is bone.

All bloods are red and all bones white.

The beginning is being born.

The end is being dead.

The magnificent repeated themes of line and color

forming the final exterior of a Pharaoh mummy

try to appeal otherwise and fix an affirmation

of the blood there yet and the bones there yet.

Nevertheless and for all the exquisite patterning

The blood is dry as dust and the bones obey no voices

Telling them to rise and walk.

Some such Pharaohs are born with a name,

one more of a line of names.

Some such Pharaohs die with music and mourning

and sleep under careful epitaphs.

Yet they and the scrubs, the rabble, the hoi polloi

end in the same democracy to never fail them all,

to be true to each, to render the blood and bones

of high and humble the dust of homage.

This is the timeworm chant of the grand democrat

Death: dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

For them all, scrub or wellborn, the hustle, the race,

the hullabaloo, is over.

They no longer earn their livings.

They no longer take what is handed them.

Old Hokusai Print

In a house he remembers in the Howlong valley

not far from bends of the Shooshoo river

where each of the leaves of fall

is a pigeon foot of gold on the blue:

there is a house of a thousand windows

and in every window the same woman

and she too remembers better than she forgets:

she too has one wish for every window:

and the mountains forty miles away

rise and fade, come and go,

in lights and mist there and not there,

beckoning as mountains seen on a Monday,

phantoms traveled away on a Tuesday,

scrawls in a dim blot on Wednesday,

gone into grey shawls on Friday,

lost and found in half lavenders often,

back again one day saying they were not gone,

not gone at all, being merely unseen,

the white snow on the blue peaks no dream snow,

no dream at all the sawtooth line of purple garments.

Can a skyline share itself like drums in the heart?

One Parting

Why did he write to her,

“I can’t live with you"?

And why did she write to him,

“I can’t live without you”?

For he went west, she went east,

And they both lived.

Ever a Seeker

The fingers turn the pages.

The pages unfold as a scroll.

There was the time there was no America.

Then came on the scroll an early

America, a land of beginnings,

an American being born.

Then came a later America, seeker

and finder, yet ever more seeker

than finder, ever seeking its way

amid storm and dream.

Old Music for Quiet Hearts

Be still as before oh pool

Be blue and still oh pool

As before blue     as before still

Oh pool of the many communions

A wingprint may come

Flash over and be gone

A yellow leaf may fall

May sink and join

Companion fallen leaves

The print of blue sky

The night bowl of stars

These far off pass and bypass

Over you blue     over you still

Oh pool of the many communions

Now hold your quiet glass oh pool

Now keep your mirrorlight blue

They come and they go

And one and all

You know them one and all

And they know not you

Nor you nor your mirrorlight blue

Only old music for quiet hearts;

Personalia

The personal idiom of a corn shock satisfies me.

So does the attack of a high note by an Australian mezzosoprano.

Also the face and body blow punishment taken by the boilermaker who won the world’s championship belt.

I find majesty in the remembrance of a stump speech by John P. Altgeld explaining his act as governor of Illinois in the pardon of four convicts.

The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.

The color of redhaws when the last driving rain of October sprays their gypsy crimson against the khaki brown of the blown leaves, the ankle-deep leaves—

If I should be sent to jail I would write of these things, lover of mine.

If I live to a majestic old age becoming the owner of a farm I shall sit under apple trees in the summer and on a pad of paper with a large yellow lead pencil, I shall write of these things, lover of mine.

The Gong of Time

Time says hush.

By the gong of time you live.

Listen and you hear time saying you were silent

long before you came to life and you will

again be silent long after you leave it,

why not be a little silent now?

Hush yourself, noisy little man.

Time hushes all.

The gong of time rang for you to come out of a

hush and you were born.

The gong of time will ring for you to go back to

the same hush you came from.

Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those

who say little and try to say it well, and

those who babble and prattle their lives away,

Time hushes all.

Prairie Woodland

Yellow leaves speak early November’s heart on the river.

Winding in prairie woodland the curves of the water course are a young woman’s breasts.

Flutter and flutter go the spear shapes—it is a rust and a saffron always dropping hour on hour.

Sunny and winey the filtering shine of air passes the drivers, cornhuskers, farmers, children in the fields.

Red jags of sumach and slashes of shag-bark hickory are a crimson and gray cramming pictures on the river glass.

Out of their tubes of May and June they squeeze great changing dabs of earth love, wind passion.

Now it is a sorrel horse neck, now a slow fire of Warsaw, anything you wish for—here in the moving leaves and slow waters.

Five o’clock and a lemon sky—long tubes spread lemon miles and miles—submarines, dreadnaughts, coal-boats, flotillas of destroyers cross the lemon sea bringing darkness, night.

Shadows Fall Blue on the Mountains

Shadows fall blue on the mountains.

Mountains fall gray to the rivers.

Rivers fall winding to the sea.

Oldest of all the blue creep,

the gray crawl of the sea

And only shadows falling older than the sea.

***

***

Can you begin to own

both yourself and your shadow?

Can you measure

moments in the sun

when your shadow lays down your shape?

Does your shadow speak to you

or is it you telling your shadow

what to be telling you?

Can a man listen to his shadow

hoping it tells him where to go,

what to do when he gets there?

Has ever been a man praying,

“Make me into a thin

goblet of glass, oh Lord.

I fear what my shadow tells me”?

What has happened

when you forget and the sun forgets

to lay down your old companion,

your lifelong shadow?

***

***

Now the shadow of Shakespeare—

what did he say to it?

what did he leave unsaid?

and how well did he know he left

millions of shadow soliloquies unspoken?

When Napoleon saw his shadow

could it be he lacked for words

and often beyond his own

saw shadows fateful as his own?

***

***

Shadows lighter than any mist

fall on the sea’s blue creep,

on the sea’s gray crawl.

Fateful high over

swings the sun

swings the High Witness

of shadows.

Quotations

Said the panama hat to the fedora:

“Sins have different prices in hell.”

Said the fedora hat to the panama:

“Yeah, nickel and dime sins, silver-dollar sins,

sins setting you back a century, a grand,

sins you can’t settle under a million bucks,

tin and aluminum sins, brass sins, copper, old gold,

pint and bushel sins, inch and mile sins,

calculated little teapot sins and roaring tornadoes.”

Skyscrapers Stand Proud

The skyscrapers stand proud.

They seem to say they have

sought the absolute

and made it their own.

Yet they are blameless, innocent

as dumb steel and the dumber

concrete of their bastions.

“Man made us,” they murmur. “We are

proud only as man is proud and we

have no more found the absolute

than has man.”

Pool of Bethesda

A man came to the pool of Bethesda

and sat down for his thoughts.

The light of the sun ran through the line

of the water and struck where the moss on

a stone was green—

The green of the moss wove into the sun silver

and the silent brackets of seven prisms added

to the pool of Bethesda—

Thus a man sat long with a pool and its prisms.

***

First Sonata for Karlen Paula

At an autumn evening bonfire

came rose-candle co-ordinations.

Burning and burnt

came a slow song of fire leaves.

The summer brought

valley breaths of spun moonmist.

Can there be keys

commanding the locks of constellations,

letting loose white spokes of light,

blue waves of flame?

***

***

Make like before, sweet child.

Be you like five new oranges in a wicker basket.

Step out like

a summer evening fireworks over black waters.

Be dizzy in a haze of yellow silk bandannas.

Then in a change of costume

sit silent in a chair of tarnished bronze

Having spoken with a grave mouth:

“Now I will be

a clavichord melody

in October brown.

You will see me in

deep-sea contemplation

on a yellow horse in a white wind.”

***

***

Her room had a number.

Likewise she had a number.

They heard her saying:

“Who is more numbers than I am?

Which of you on a golden morning

has sent a silver bullet

into a crimson target?”

***

***

Daybreak creeps

in a first thin shimmering.

Neither is the day come

nor the night gone.

***

***

Be shabbawobba now

before this pool of day to come.

Speak and be still.

Listen and be still.

A ring of topaz floats in rose-light.

Handles of moongold go in a hush.

The pool welcomes a pair of orange slippers,

the gauze of them winking out and coming back.

Come passwords, come numerals,

come changing altar lights.

Fingers, be cool, strum only half-heard chords.

Let your words be softer than

a slow south wind blowing thistledown.

Thou Art Like a Flower

“Thou art like a flower,”

Ran an old song line.

What flower did he mean?

She might have been a quiet blue flower.

She wore crimson carnations perhaps.

She may have planted tall sunflowers

Stooping with hollyhocks around a kitchen doorstep.

They may have picked bluebells together

Or talked about wild arbutus they found.

Perhaps she knew what he meant by telling her:

“Thou art like a flower.”

Solo for Saturday Night Guitar

Time was. Time is. Time shall be.

Man invented time to be used.

Love was. Love is. Love shall be.

Yet man never invented love

Nor is love to be used like time.

A clock wears numbers one to twelve

And you look and read its face

And tell the time pre-cise-ly ex-act-ly.

Yet who reads the face of love?

Who tells love numbers pre-cisely ex-act-ly?

Holding love in a tight hold for keeps.

Fastening love down and saying

“It’s here now and here for always.”

You don’t do this offhand, careless-like.

Love costs. Love is not so easy

Nor is the shimmering of star dust

Nor the smooth flow of new blossoms

Nor the drag of a heavy hungering for someone,

Love is a white horse you ride

or wheels and hammers leaving you lonely

or a rock in the moonlight for rest

or a sea where phantom ships cross always

or a tall shadow always whispering

or a circle of spray and prisms—

maybe a rainbow round your shoulder.

Heavy heavy is love to carry

and light as one rose petal,

light as a bubble, a blossom,

a remembering bar of music

or a finger or a wisp of hair

never forgotten.

Rose Bawn

She believed herself to have gone through tall gateways and to have marched triumphant across fire and thorn. She sat in front of a county building, under a mulberry, and once she mumbled to an invisible Irish sweetheart, “All the knocking of the tumblers of the sea is in my knee bones.”

When the chariots of thunder drove and rolled overhead, she mumbled, “When the water comes through the sieve of the sky, that makes the rain—God does it easy—God does all things easy.”

Memories swept over her like a strong wind on dark waters. She half-whispered, “When the moongold came on the water afterward it was too much money—too much by far—more than we wanted.”

Speech

There was

what we call “words,”

a lot of language,

syllables,

each syllable made of air.

Then there was

s i l e n c e ,

no talk at all,

no more syllables

shaped by living tongues

out of wandering air.

Thus all tongues

slowly talk themselves

into s i l e n c e .

Runaway Colors

The smoke of these landscapes has gone God knows

where.

The sun touches them off with shot gold of an evening,

with a mother’s grey eyes singing to her children.

The blue smudge on a haystack a mile off is gone God

knows where.

The yellow dust of a sheet over Emil Hawkinson’s

cornfield,

The ribbons of red picked at by the high-flying

hard-crying crows,

These too are in the pits of the west God knows where.

Out of the Rainbow End

For Edward Steichen

A delphinium flings a shadow

with a rooted stalk—

a personal shadow.

Each silhouette documents

designs and dooms woven

between shape and shadowshape.

You may add two delphiniums

with seeds lighted in soil

with stalks prepared in loam

toward the upheave into bloom

when stalk and leaves find a path

hold a rocketform of blue

hold it in a velvet stillstand.

In a summer daybreak rain

a huddle of delphiniums

across spikes of fogblue leaves

out of little mistblue cups

trade meditations on being

shapes and shadowshapes.

Cups and bells nod in the sun,

in the fine dust of the wind:

one newborn delphinium laughing

at the long scroll of marriages

whereby she is the latest child

bringing to the bright air her shape,

to the dark earth her shadow.

Shaded out of seven prisms

in choices by living fingers

out of the rainbow end?

Yes and the winds

of many evenings came:

dawns drew in with dew and mist

and the bells of many rains rang.

Soft and lovely

these transients go yet stay

Even their violence goes in velvet.

Sun Dancer

Spider, you have long silver legs.

You may spin diagrams of doom.

Your patterns may throw fine glints

Festooned from wandering silk.

It may be neither art nor money

Nor calisthenics nor engineering.

No man trusts any woman and vice versa.

All men love all women and vice versa.

And all friends cherish each other.

And there are triflers who flirt with death.

Spider, you have long silver legs.

Themes in Contrast

A blue shot dawn,

A white shot dawn,

And she went out.

Into the dawn water

Until the dawn water

Came over her head.

And she came back

Out of the water

Into a blue shot dawn,

Into a white shot dawn.

***

***

The trucks and the cavalry came,

The shoes and the wheels, the tarpaulins

dripping.

And the shadows of the grain elevators

In the hump of the blown white moon,

And the breathing of the tugs and barges

In the change of the fog river gray—

These all crossed over; the day after they

stood up; the day after was something

else again.

Two Fish

when the two fish spoke

their speech was scarlet

they met in a bowl

of molten gold air

they swung in an arch

of seven rainbow sheens

they swam in a grotto

one of a thousand grottoes

they shook their fins

in a green feather dust

Smoke Shapes

Egg Faces

Lights of egg faces, lights of monkey skulls,

meet each other, meet yourselves.

Lights of the morning sun warming the night-

wet wood, fires of far-back mornings fixing

your caldrons cooling to firestone,

meet each other, meet yourselves.

Sheet white egg faces, strong and sad gorilla

mugs, meet yourselves, meet each other.

Long Heads

Sleep, long-face of the long-head family.

Go back to the inside of the ten thousandth

mountain you came from.

Out of sleep you came; back to sleep you go.

Eyes out of morning twilights, how now it is easy

to join up with evening twilights.

Nose cut from the spear handle of a morning star

finding its mirror-slant in a mountain rock nose,

how now it is easy to sit next and alongside an

evening star spear handle.

Yearn, too; you might as well yearn; yearners or

not, out of sleep, back to sleep; this is put on

the mouth.

Sleep, long-face, back now to the inside of the

ten thousandth mountain.

Three Shrines

Three shrines a woman has for a man.

She loves him for what he is out in the world.

She loves him for what he seems to her of which

the world knows nothing.

She loves him for the touch of his personal

magnets.

Thus we might frame these three declarations and

listen to bystanders:

Is that so?

Who told you—a little bird?

What are these personal magnets?

What is a shrine?

You mean she never opened

a barrel of snakes for him?

Variations on a Theme

She was given crystal flesh for a home.

And her windows were tremulous to visions.

Love me, love me, was her often cry.

She put lover higher than all else.

She carried series of love-birds and gave away.

***

***

Pour love deep into me.

Thus ran her cry.

Let me have all love.

She murmured this want.

Love may be toil, waste, death

Yet come pour love deep into me.

Thus her years ran to one theme.

Timesweep

I was born in the morning of the world,

So I know how morning looks,

morning in the valley wanting,

morning on a mountain wanting.

Morning looks like people look,

like a cornfield wanting corn,

like a sea wanting ships.

Tell me about any strong beautiful wanting

And there is your morning, my morning,

everybody’s morning.

Makers and givers may be moon shaken,

may be star lost,

Knowing themselves as sea-deep seekers,

both seeking and sought,

Knowing love is a ring and the ring endless,

Seeing love as a wheel and the wheel endless.

Love may be a hard flesh crying its want.

Love may be a thin horizon air,

thinner than snowwhite wool finespun,

finer than any faint blue mist

blown away and gone on yesterday’s wind.

There are hungers

for a nameless bread

out of the dust

of the hard earth,

out of the blaze

of the calm sun.

Blow now, winds, you so old at blowing.

Oat at the river, pine at the rocks,

brandish your arms

Slow to a whisper wind, fast to a storm howl.

***

***

The wind carves sand into shapes,

Endless the fresh designs,

Wind and ice patient beyond telling.

Ice can tip mountains over,

Ice the giant beyond measure.

And the sun governs valley lights,

Transforms hats into shoes and back again

Before we are through any long looking.

***

***

The pink nipples of the earth in springtime,

The long black eyelashes of summer’s look,

The harvest laughter of tawny autumn,

The winter silence of land in snow covers,

Each speaks its own oaths of the cool and the flame

of naked possessions clothed and come naked again:

The sea knows it all.

They all crept out of the sea.

***

***

These wheels within wheels

These leaves folded in leaves

These wheeling winds

and winding leaves

Those sprockets

from those seeds

This spiral shooting

from that rainfall—

What does a turning earth

say to its axis?

How should a melon say thanks

Or a squash utter blessings?

***

***

In the heave of the hankering sea

God put precisions of music and accord

to be heard in the deepest seabells

amid the farthest violet spawn

moving in seagreen doom and skyblue promise.

The sea shares its tokens—

how and with whom?

To these shores birds return

and keep returning

for the curves of fresh flights.

To these waters fish return

and keep returning

for the fathoming of old waters.

To sky and sea they are born

and keep returning to be reborn.

The sharing of the sea goes on

for the sake of wings and fins

ever returning to new skyblue,

ever reborn in new seagreen.

Could the gray-green lobster speak

what would he say

of personal secrets?

Could one white gull utter a word—

what would it be?

what white feather of a word?

***

***

Among the shapes and shadow-shapes

in the blurs of the marching animals,

among the open forms, the hidden and half-hidden,

who is the Head One? Me? Man?

Am I first over all, I the genus homo?

Where did I come from?

How doing now and where to from here?

Is there any going back?

And where might I want to go back?

Is it told in my dreams and hankerings, looking

back at what I was, seeing what I am?

Like so a man talking to himself

of the bitter, the sweet, the bittersweet:

he had heard likenings of himself:

Cock of the walk, brave as a lion, fierce as a tiger,

Stubborn as si mule, mean as a louse, crazy as a bedbug,

Soft as a kitten, slimy as an octopus, one poor fish.

Then he spoke for himself:

I am bat-eyed, chicken-hearted, monkey-faced.

Listen and you’ll hear it told,

I am a beast out of the jungle.

Man, proud man, with a peacock strut

seeing himself in his own man-made mirrors.

Yet I am myself all the animals.

Mix in among lavender shadows the gorilla far back

And the jungle cry of readiness for death

Or struggle—and the clean breeds who live on

In the underbrush. Mix in farther back yet

Breeds out of the slime of the sea.

Put in a high green of a restless sea.

Insinuate chlorine and mystic salts,

The make-up of vertebrates,

the long highway of mammals who chew

Their victims and feed their children

From milk at a breast,

The fathers and the mothers who battled hunger

And tore each other’s jugulars

Over land and women, laughter and language.

Put in mystery without end. Then add mystery.

The memorandum runs long.

I have feet, fins and wings.

I live on land, in the sea, in the air.

I run, fly, sneak, prowl, I kill and eat.

Among killers and eaters I am first.

I am the Head One.

What is this load I carry out of yesterday?

What are the bygones of dreams, moans, shadows?

What jargons, what gibberish, must I yet unlearn?

I have been a dim plasm in the sea,

rocking dumb, not-so-dumb, dumb again,

a dab and a dangling tangle

swarming and splitting to live again.

I have been a drop of jelly

aching with a silver shot of light

and it sang Be-now Now-be Be-now Now-be.

I have been a rockabye baby

sloshed in the sludge of the sea

and I have clung with a shell over me

waiting a tide to bring me breakfast.

I have been the little fish eaten by the big one

and I have been the big fish

taking ten lesser fish in one fast gulp.

I have been a shrimp, one of a billion,

fed to a million little fish

ending as fodder in the bellies of big fish.

In the seven seas

of the one vast glumbering sea over the globe

I have been eater and eaten,

toiler and hanger-on.

I lived half in the sea, half on land,

swimmer and crawler, fins and legs.

I traveled with layers of earthworms

grinding limestone into loam.

Encased as a snail

I wrought one pure spiral,

an image of no beginning, no end.

“This is the image wherein I live;

the outer form of me to be here

when the dried inner one drifts

away into thin air.”

I have journeyed

for sticks and mud and weaving thongs

to build me a home in a bush.

I have mounted into the blue sky

with a mate lark on a summer morning,

dropping into sycamore branches to warble.

The orioles called me one of theirs;

herons taught me to stand and wait in marsh grass,

to preen my wings and rise with legs bundled behind.

I was the awkward pelican

flying low along the florida coast with a baby.

I stood with pink flamingoes

in long lagoons at tallahassee watching sunrise.

I am black as a crow with a caw-caw in my throat

and I am lush with morning calls of catbird and mocker,

the cardinal’s what-cheer what-cheer

and the redbird’s whistle across hemlock timbers

in early april in wisconsin.

I have done the cleansing service

of scavengers on land and sea;

the red and sea-green lobsters told me

how they win a living.

I have slunk among buzzards and broken hunger

with a beak in a rottening horse.

I have fed where my greatgrandfathers fed.

I know the faint half-words

of the fly and the flea,

the midge, the mosquito.

I was kin of a vampire

doing what a blind thirst told me.

A louse seeking red blood told me

I carry feeders in blood.

I ganged up with maggots

and cleaned a cadaver

and left the bones gleaming.

I am a grasshopper taking in one jump

a hundred grasshopper lengths.

I buzz with earnest bees

in the lingering sun of apple orchards.

I loiter with tumble bugs

seeming to know solemn causes.

I climb with spiders, throw ladders, nets,

frameworks out of my navel coils.

I am the building ant

of architectonic galleries and chambers.

I am egg, cocoon and moth.

I count my caterpillar rings of black and yellow.

I inch with the inch worms

measuring pearl-green miles of summer months.

I have swept in the ashen paths of weevils,

borers, chinch bugs eating their way.

Born once as a late morning child

I died of old age before noon.

Or again I issued as a luna moth,

circles of gold spotting my lavender wings.

I have zigzagged with blue water bugs

among white lotus and pond lilies.

From my silver throat in the dew of evening

came a whippoorwill call, one, another, more

as a slow gold moon told time with climbing.

I am the chameleon taking the tint of what I live on,

the water frog green as the scum he sits on,

the tree frog gray as the tree-bark-gray.

The duck, the swan, the goose, met me as sisters,

the beaver, the porcupine, the chinchilla, as brothers.

The rattlesnakes let me live with them

to eat mice, to salivate birds and rabbits

and fatten in sleep on noontime rocks.

I was a lizard, a texas horned toad,

a centipede counting my century of legs.

I was a crocodile in africa

with a lazy mouthful of teeth.

The stealth of the rat, the mink, the squirrel, came.

The weasel gave me his lingo

of now-you-see-me now-you-don’t.

The rabbit hideout in clover, the gopher hole,

the mole tunnel, the corn-shock nest of the mouse,

these were a few of my homes.

One summer night with fireflies

I too was fluttering night gold.

Long ago I ran with the eohippus,

the little horse that was.

I wore dodo feathers

but that’s all passed.

I had a feathered form fade in fog:

you can find it now in feathered fossils.

I was a mammoth, a dinosaur

and other hulks too big to last.

I have been more quadrupeds than I can name.

I was the son of a wild jackass

with swift and punishing heels.

I lifted my legs and carried a camel hump

in slow caravans pausing at nightfall,

lifting my hump again at dawn.

I locked my horns with another moose;

our antlers lie locked and our bones whitening.

I slouched up hills of ice with polar bears,

practiced smell with the red fox,

trained my fangs with timber wolves.

I fight now for the rights to a carcass.

The killer who crouches, gets set, and leaps

is a kinsman I can call my cousin.

The strangling gibberish of the gorilla

comes out of my anxious mouth.

Among a thousand ring-tailed monkeys

scratching buttocks, sharing fleas,

shinning up trees in guatemala, I am one.

Among the blue-ramped baboons,

chattering chimpanzees and leering orangoutangs,

I am at home using paws for hands, hands for paws.

The howl of one hyena eating another is mine.

In a boneless tube of ooze

I soaked dumb days with sponges

off the gulfcoast sea-bottom.

Now I am the parrot

who picks up palaver and repeats it.

Now I am the river-hog, the hippopotamus

and I am the little bird who lives in his ear

and tells him when to get up and where to go.

I took a long sweet time learning to talk

and now I carry many half-words not yet made,

hankering hoodoo words taking shape in mud:

protoplasm, spermatozoa, phantasms, taboos.

In the pour of a thrush morningsong,

in the lonesome cry of a loon at moonrise,

is the rush of more half-words:

All horns are one horn

and I am the sheep, the goat,

the yak, the buffalo, the prongbuck.

All shells are one shell

and I am the mussel clam,

the oyster, the mother-of-pearl.

I have been a freshwater polyp, a star-fish,

budding into evermore births of likeness

following likeness.

I have spent nights as kin of singing crickets,

meadow locusts, katydids, only the males singing,

the females silent and waiting

I have been the calling frog with a bubble at his

throat—and the spotted snake who came to spell

doom and appeasement of hunger.

I have spoken as a brother to the walking stick

and the hesitations of his stilts and knee-joints.

I am the penguin and ostrich

trying to remember lost wings.

I am the snake who had many legs

trying to remember my lost legs.

I have had a thousand fish faces, sea faces,

sliding off into land faces, monkey faces—

I began in a dim green mist

of floating faces.

I have worn covers of thick strong hair and smooth fur.

I have shed rain and sleet with my feathers and down.

I have carried thick wool wrapping me warm as I slept

in snow.

I have had tropic and arctic garments bestowed on me.

***

***

Since death is there in the light of the sun, in the song of the wind,

Since death is there in the marvel of the sun coining up to travel its arc and go down saying, “I am time and you are time,”

Since death is there in the slow creep of every dawn and in all the steps of shadow moving into evening and dusk of stars,

Since death is there in almost inaudible chimes of every slow clocktick beginning at the birth hour there must be a tremor of music in the last little gong, the pling of the final announcement from, the Black Void.

Have I not seen forms

flowing into faces and voices—

numbers hoarse and high with the mating cry

over rolling white sea-horses and forked lightning,

over the infinite velvet of blue land-fog,

over sacramental bread and heavy blood roses,

over mate-brown pigeons flying into burnt wilderness,

gazing into star-pool waters holding the great serene

constellations?

I meditate with the mud eel

on where we came from.

Not yet can I give the scream speech

of a great white albatross—

frozen foam and sea-drift for her

high on an iceberg’s shining white hat,

whirr and sweep of her wings

in the splinters of an arc of northern lights.

I am a three-hundred-year-old galapagos turtle,

sleeping and eating, eating and sleeping,

blinking and easy, sleepy-eyed and easy,

while shakespeare writes a flock of plays,

while john bunyan sits in jail and writes a book,

while cromwell, napoleon, lincoln, wilson, lenin,

come and go, stride and vanish

while bryan, morgan, rockefeller, lafolette, algeld,

become names spelled and written.

I sleep, forget, remember, forget again, and ask:

What of it?

Don’t bother me, brother.

Don’t bother a dozing turtle

born to contemplate and yawn.

I was a scorpion and a tarantula

before the first huts of guadalajara,

before the first aztecs gathered bananas.

I was a maroon cockatoo and a green parakeet

before the first incas fashioned bird-cages.

In western nebraska I was a wild prairie pony

with a white forelock down my sorrel face

before ever a caesar or alexander or any czar

dreamed the smoke-shadow of a dream

of shattering armies beyond the horizon

and taking over.

What is this burden I carry out of yesterday?

Why am I so wise, so grand, so cunning, so ignorant?

What have I made that I haven’t broken?

What have I bred that I haven’t killed?

Why have I prized my skills as a killer?

What jargons, what gibberish, must I yet unlearn?

What are these bygones of dreams, moans, shadows?

Who are these people I come from who follow the ways

of long-gone time and long-gone fathers?

What are these bygones

sea-brought and land-locked?

For I am one and all of them:

they swarm in me with song, cry and murmur;

they fill my room with scurrying fish,

with apes and kangaroos, with swine and birds;

they bring arenas and theaters of action

wherein they kill, eat, crave, sing, live on,

or perish before the might of the stronger;

they stir with bleats and moans;

they fade with growls and chuckles.

They dream in me

and rise dripping on sea horizons

to shout hosannahs, to cry thanks,

to vanish leaving no sign nor track

on the silent lines of green mist.

The earth rocked me

in a cradle of winds.

The fog and the mud

clung as a wrap and home

of swaddling cloths.

And the sea sang bye-lo bye-lo

and the stars and the rains

brought changing songs: so-long so-long

joined to the sea’s old bye-lo bye-lo.

***

***

Deep roots moving in lush soil to send a silver-gray beech tree straight toward the sky—

Shallow roots in barren land sending their stalks of grass and weeds up over to bend in the wind with whisper tones—

Tangled and winding roots in desert wastes rising into cactus and the joshua tree to bring a hush on the air with spare and murmuring blossoms wrought from dews of night air—

Am I, are you, kin to these everliving roots? Have you, have I, one time long ago been an oak with a wind song in our leaves?

Have the bones of your torso spoken low to a sugar maple in october flaming in branch and leaf: “We can not be strangers, I know how you are what you are in root and trunk.”

***

***

I have said to the elephant and the flea, “Each of us makes his life in what to him is the Known and for each of us there is a vast Unknown and farther beyond the vaster Unknowable—and the Ignorance we share and share alike is immeasurable.”

The one-eyed mollusc on the sea-bottom, feathered and luminous, is my equal in what he and I know of star clusters not yet found by the best of star-gazers.

***

***

The earth is a forgotten cinder.

A heaving fireball cooled off.

Thus the story of the rocks.

Each river came later than the cooling.

Next comes the freezing of the globe.

A heaving iceball will travel alone.

The rivers will be too cold to move.

Each flowering valley will be a memory.

The autobiography of a wild rose will run:

My leaves pressed between the times

of a fireball and an iceball.

***

***

I have been woven among meshes of long ropes

and fine filaments: older than the rocks and

fresh as the dawn of this morning today are

the everliving roots who begot me,

who poured me as one more seeker

one more swimmer in the gold and gray procession

of phantoms laughing, fighting, singing, moan-

ing toward the great cool calm of the fixed

return to the filaments of dust.

I am more than a traveler out of Nowhere.

Sea and land, sky and air, begot me Somewhere.

Where I go from here and now, or if I go at all

again, the Maker of sea and land, of sky and

air, can tell.

***

***

There is only one horse on the earth

and his name is All Horses.

There is only one bird in the air

and his name is All Wings.

There is only one fish in the sea

and his name is All Fins.

There is only one man in the world

and his name is All Men.

There is only one woman in the world

and her name is All Women.

There is only one child in the world

and the child’s name is All Children.

There is only one Maker in the world

and His children cover the earth

and they are named All God’s Children.

About the Author

CARL SANDBURG (1878–1967) was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1940 for his biography of Abraham Lincoln and again in 1951 for Complete Poems. Before becoming known as a poet, he worked as a milkman, an ice harvester, a dishwasher, a salesman, a fireman, and a journalist. Among his classics are the Rootabaga Stories, which he wrote for his young daughters at the beginning of his long and distinguished literary career.