Cornhuskers | Page 5

Here in Omaha
The gloaming is bitter
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand changes.
To-day is a goner.
Time knocks in another brass nail.
Another yellow plunger shoots the dark.

Constellations
Wheeling over Omaha
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand is gone
and all the talk is stars.
They circle in a dome over Nebraska.
STILL LIFE
Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.?Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.?Take in the prairie fight and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun. A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye. A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye. A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.
BAND CONCERT
BAND concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues.
Cowboy rags and nigger rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet staccato and the tuba oompa, gigglers, God knows, gigglers daffy with life's razzle dazzle.
Slow good-night melodies and Home Sweet Home. And the snare drummer bookkeeper in a hardware store nods hello to the daughter of a railroad conductor-- a giggler, God knows, a giggler--and the summerwhite dresses filter fanwise out of the public square.
The crushed strawberries of ice cream soda places, the night wind in cottonwoods and willows, the lattice shadows of doorsteps and porches, these know more of the story.
THREE PIECES ON THE SMOKE OF AUTUMN
SMOKE Of autumn is on it all.?The streamers loosen and travel.?The red west is stopped with a gray haze.?They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,?They make a long-tailed rider?In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.
There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.
Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.
(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)
I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.
Better the blue silence and the gray west,?The autumn mist on the river,?And not any hate and not any love,?And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:?Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,?And the new corn shoveled in bushels?And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,?Umber lights of the dark,?Umber lanterns of the loam dark.
Here a dog head dreams.?Not any hate, not any love.?Not anything but dreams.?Brother of dusk and umber.
LOCALITIES
WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw?And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple 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