Cornhuskers | Page 7

new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there ain't too much rain or too little:
Say, why do I feel so gabby?
Why do I want to holler all over the place?
Do you remember I held empty hands to you
and I said all is yours
the handfuls of nothing?
I ask you for white blossoms.?I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.?I bring out "The Spanish Cavalier" and "In the Gloaming, O My Darling."
The orchard here is near and home-like.?The oats in the valley run a mile.?Between are the green and marching potato vines.?The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of fire: the potato bugs are asleep under their stiff
and yellow-striped wings: here romance stutters to the western stars, "Excuse... me..."
Old foundations of rotten wood.?An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten-legged roaches shook up and scared by sunlight, So a pickax digs a long tooth with a short memory.?Fire can not eat this rubbish till it has lain in the sun.
The story lags.?The story has no connections.?The story is nothing but a lot of banjo plinka planka plunks.
The roan horse is young and will learn: the roan horse buckles into harness and feels the foam on the collar at the end of a haul: the roan horse points four legs to the sky and rolls in the red clover: the roan horse has a rusty jag of hair between the ears hanging to a white star between the eyes.
In Burlington long ago?And later again in Ashtabula?I said to myself:
I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet.?What else was there Shakespeare never told??There must have been something.?If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia.?There was class to the way she went out of her head.
Does a famous poet eat watermelon??Excuse me, ask me something easy.
I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfish on a Monday morning.
And the Japanese, two-legged like us,?The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures.?The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat.
Why do I always think of niggers and buck-and-wing dancing whenever I see watermelon?
Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach baskets piled ten feet high. Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind along with peaches. I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong-honging across the town. And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hayrack load of melons.
Niggers play banjos because they want to.?The explanation is easy.
It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a policemen's masquerade ball or a grocers-and butchers' picnic with a fat man's foot race.?It is the same as why boys buy a nickel's worth of peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel's worth. Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved. The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory.
It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split away from a school-room geography lesson in April when the crawfishes come out and the young frogs are calling and the pussywillows and the cat-tails know something about geography themselves.
I ask you for white blossoms.?I offer you memories and people.?I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching vines. I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like apple trees. I make up songs about things to look at: potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the garden with white spots; a cavalryman's yellow silk handkerchief stuck in a flannel pocket over the left side of the shirt, over the ventricles of blood, over the pumps of the heart.
Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.?Let romance stutter to the western stars, "Excuse ...me..."
LOAM
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.
MANITOBA CHILDE ROLAND
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