Cornhuskers | Page 3

mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.?They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire.
The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands.?There is no let-up to the wind.?Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.
Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o'clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth is grizzled.
The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches--among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain--they keep old things that never grow old.
The frost loosens corn husks.?The Sun, the rain, the wind
loosen corn husks.?The men and women are helpers.?They are all cornhuskers together.?I see them late in the western evening
in a smoke-red dust.
The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight,?The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib,?The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall,?These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights. "The shapes that are gone are here," said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.
Look at six eggs?In a mockingbird's nest.
Listen to six mockingbirds?Flinging follies of O-be-joyful?Over the marshes and uplands.
Look at songs?Hidden in eggs.
When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen pans: Shout All Over God's Heaven. When the rain slants on the potato hills and the sun plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.?When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way.
Spring slips back with a girl face calling always: "Any new songs for me? Any new songs?"
O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting-- your lover comes--your child comes--the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod.?O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back--?There is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley.
O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.?I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love. Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
I speak of new cities and new people.?I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.?I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
a sun dropped in the west.?I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of to-morrows,
a sky of to-morrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown:
To-morrow is a day.
RIVER ROADS
LET the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.?They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere. Let 'em hawk their caw and caw.
Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump.?He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to his head. Let his red head drum and drum.
Let the dark pools hold the birds in a looking-glass.?And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the b!ur of many wings, old swimmers from old places.
Let the redwing streak a line of vermillion on the green wood lines. And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of a woman's shawl on lazy shoulders.
PRAIRIE WATERS BY NIGHT
CHATTER of birds two by two raises a night song joining a litany of running water--sheer waters showing the russet of old stones remembering many rains.
And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the running water, and sleep from much music; joined songs of day-end, feathery throats and stony waters, in a choir chanting new psalms.
It is too much for the long willows