Wind Song

LONG ago I learned how to sleep,

In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,

In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,

In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling,  'Who, who are you?'

I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson.

Work Gangs, poem by Carl Sandburg

BOX cars run by a mile long.

And I wonder what they say to each other

When they stop a mile long on a sidetrack.

Maybe their chatter goes:

I came from Fargo with a load of wheat up to the danger line.

I came from Omaha with a load of shorthorns and they splintered my boards.

I came from Detroit heavy with a load of flivvers.

I carried apples from the Hood river last year and this year

Under the Harvest Moon

Under the harvest moon,When the soft silverDrips shimmeringOver the garden nights,Death, the gray mocker,Comes and whispers to youAs a beautiful friendWho remembers.Under the summer rosesWhen the flagrant crimsonLurks in the duskOf the wild red leaves,Love, with little hands,Comes and touches youWith a thousand memories,And asks youBeautiful, unanswerable questions.

White Hands

FOR the second time in a year this lady with the white hands is brought to the west room second floor of a famous sanatorium.Her husband is a cornice manufacturer in an Iowa town and the lady has often read papers on Victorian poets before the local literary club.Yesterday she washed her hands forty seven times during her waking hours and in her sleep moaned restlessly attempting to clean

Whitelight

YOUR whitelight flashes the frost to-nightMoon of the purple and silent west.Remember me one of your lovers of dreams.

Wilderness

THERE is a wolf in me
fangs pointed for tearing gashes
a red tongue for raw meat
and the hot lapping of blood

I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it
to me and the wilderness will not let it go.


There is a fox in me
a silver-gray fox
I sniff and guess
I pick things out of the wind and air
I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers
I circle and loop

To a Dead Man

Over the dead line we have called to you
To come across with a word to us,
Some beaten whisper of what happens
Where you are over the dead line
Deaf to our calls and voiceless.


The flickering shadows have not answered
Nor your lips sent a signal
Whether love talks and roses grow
And the sun breaks at morning
Splattering the sea with crimson.

Under a Hat Rim

WHILE the hum and the hurry

Of passing footfalls

Beat in my ear like the restless surf

Of a wind-blown sea,

A soul came to me

Out of the look on a face.


Eyes like a lake

Where a storm-wind roams

Caught me from under

The rim of a hat.

I thought of a midsea wreck

and bruised fingers clinging

to a broken state-room door.

The South Wind Say So

IF the oriole calls like last yearwhen the south wind sings in the oats,if the leaves climb and climb on a bean polesaying over a song learnt from the south wind,if the crickets send up the same old lessonsfound when the south wind keeps on coming,we will get by, we will keep on coming,we will get by, we will come along,we will fix our hearts over,the south wind says so.

Testimony Regarding a Ghost

THE ROSES slanted crimson sobsOn the night sky hair of the women,And the long light-fingered menSpoke to the dark-haired women,�Nothing lovelier, nothing lovelier.�How could he sit there among us allGuzzling blood into his guts,Goblets, mugs, buckets�Leaning, toppling, laughingWith a slobber on his mouth,A smear of red on his strong raw lips,How could he sit thereAnd only two or three of us see

Under A Telephone Pole

I AM a copper wire slung in the air,Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and thetears, the work and want,Death and laughter of men and women passing throughme, carrier of your speech,In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and theshine drying,A copper wire.