Cornhuskers | Page 9

HANKS dreams by the fire;?Dreams, and the logs sputter,?And the yellow tongues climb.?Red lines lick their way in flickers.?Oh, sputter, logs.
Oh, dream, Nancy.?Time now for a beautiful child.?Time now for a tall man to come.
REPETITIONS
THEY are crying salt tears?Over the beautiful beloved body?Of Inez Milholland,?Because they are glad she lived,?Because she loved open-armed,?Throwing love for a cheap thing?Belonging to everybody--?Cheap as sunlight,?And morning air.
ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
AMONG the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
I read your heart in a book.
And your mouth of blue pansy--I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.
And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.
And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
Mother of God, I'm so little a thing,
Let me sing longer,
Only a little longer.
And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.
YOUNG BULLFROGS
JIMMY WIMBLETON listened a first week in June.?Ditches along prairie roads of Northern Illinois?Filled the arch of night with young bullfrog songs.?Infinite mathematical metronomic croaks rose and spoke,?Rose and sang, rose in a choir of puzzles.?They made his head ache with riddles of music.?They rested his head with beaten cadence.?Jimmy Wimbledon listened.
MEMOIR OF A PROUD BOY
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 butt.
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.
BILBEA
(From tablet writing, Babylonian excavations of 4th millennium B.C.)
BILBEA, I was in Babylon on Saturday night.?I saw nothing of you anywhere.?I was at the old place and the other girls were there, but no Bilbea.
Have you gone to another house? or city??Why don't you write??I was sorry. I walked home half-sick.
Tell me how it goes.?Send me some kind of a letter.?And take care of yourself.
SOUTHERN PACIFIC
HUNTINGTON sleeps in a house six feet long.?Huntington dreams of railroads he built and owned.?Huntington dreams of ten thousand men saying: Yes, sir.
Blithery sleeps in a house six feet long.?Blithery dreams of rails and ties he laid.?Blithery dreams of saying to Huntington: Yes, sir.
Huntington,?Blithery, sleep in houses six feet long.
WASHERWOMAN
THE washerwoman is a member of the Salvation Army.?And over the tub of suds rubbing underwear clean?She sings that Jesus will wash her sins away,?And the red wrongs she has done God and man?Shall be white as driven snow.?Rubbing underwear she sings of the Last Great Washday.
PORTRAIT OF A MOTOR CAR
IT'S a lean car... a long-legged dog of a car ... a gray-ghost eagle car. The feet of it eat the dirt of a road... the wings of it eat the hills. Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep. It is in Danny's life and runs in the blood of him ... a lean gray-ghost car.
GIRL IN A CAGE
HERE in a cage the dollars come down.