Back Yard
Back Yard
Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.
An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion.
A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month; to-night they are
throwing you kisses.
An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a cherry tree in his back
yard.
The clocks say I must go—I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking white thoughts
you rain down.
Shine on, O moon,
Shake out more and more silver changes.
Baby Toes
Baby Toes
There is a blue star, Janet,
Fifteen years’ ride from us,
If we ride a hundred miles an hour.
There is a white star, Janet,
Forty years’ ride from us,
If we ride a hundred miles an hour.
Shall we ride
To the blue star
Or the white star?
Aztec Mask
Aztec Mask
I wanted a man’s face looking into the jaws and throat of life
With something proud on his face, so proud no smash of the jaws,
No gulp of the throat leaves the face in the end
With anything else than the old proud look:
Even to the finish, dumped in the dust,
Lost among the used-up cinders,
This face, men would say, is a flash,
Is laid on bones taken from the ribs of the earth,
Ready for the hammers of changing, changing years,
Ready for the sleeping, sleeping years of silence.
Ready for the dust and fire and wind.
I wanted this face and I saw it today in an Aztec mask.
A cry out of storm and dark, a red yell and a purple prayer,
A beaten shape of ashes
waiting the sunrise or night,
something or nothing,
proud-mouthed,
proud-eyed gambler.
Autumn Movement
Autumn Movement
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,
new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,
and the old things go, not one lasts.
Ashurnatsirpal III
Ashurnatsirpal III
Three walls around the town of Tela when I came.
They expected everything of those walls;
Nobody in the town came out to kiss my feet.
I knocked the walls down, killed three thousand soldiers,
Took away cattle and sheep, took all the loot in sight,
And burned special captives.
Some of the soldiers—I cut off hands and feet.
Others—I cut off ears and fingers.
Some—I put out the eyes.
I made a pyramid of heads.
I strung heads on trees circling the town.
When I got through with it
There wasn’t much left of the town of Tela.
Aprons of Silence
Aprons of Silence
Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes,
me-too, me-too.
The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gable of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.
I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it--on the streets, in the post office,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, "All a-board,
All a-board for . . . Blaa-blaa . . . Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa . . . and all points northwest . . .all a-board."
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.
And This Will Be All....
And This Will Be All....
And this will be all?
And the gates will never open again?
And the dust and the wind will play around the rusty door hinges and the songs of
October moan, Why-oh, why-oh?
And you will look to the mountains
And the mountains will look to you
And you will wish you were a mountain
And the mountain will wish nothing at all?
This will be all?
The gates will never-never open again?
The dust and the wind only
And the rusty door hinges and moaning October
And Why-oh, why-oh, in the moaning dry leaves,
This will be all?
Nothing in the air but songs
And no singers, no mouths to know the songs?
You tell us a woman with a heartache tells you it is so?
This will be all?
An Electric Sign Goes Dark
An Electric Sign Goes Dark
Poland, France, Judea ran in her veins,
Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork.
“Won’t you come and play wiz me” she sang … and “I just can’t make my eyes
behave.”
“Higgeldy-Piggeldy,” “Papa’s Wife,” “Follow Me” were plays.
Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk?
The newspapers asked.
Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.
Twenty years old … thirty … forty …
Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver
tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter,
a cab driver.
And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths
in France.
A voice, a shape, gone.
A baby bundle from Warsaw … legs, torso, head … on a hotel bed at The Savoy.
The white chiselings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for
packed houses:
A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark.
She belonged to somebody, nobody.
No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand.
She belonged to many thousand men, lovers of the white chiseling of arms and
shoulders, the ivory of a laugh, the bells of song.
Railroad brakemen taking trains across Nebraska prairies, lumbermen jaunting in pine
and tamarack of the Northwest, stock ranchers in the middle west, mayors of southern
cities
Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead.
Always The Mob
Always The Mob
Jesus emptied the devils of one man into forty hogs and the hogs took the edge of a
high rock and dropped off and down into the sea: a mob.
The sheep on the hills of Australia, blundering fourfooted in the sunset mist to the
dark, they go one way, they hunt one sleep, they find one pocket of grass for all.
Karnak? Pyramids? Sphinx paws tall as a coolie? Tombs kept for kings and sacred
cows? A mob.
Young roast pigs and naked dancing girls of Belshazzar, the room where a thousand sat
guzzling when a hand wrote: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin? A mob.
The honeycomb of green that won the sun as the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh, flew to
its shape at the hands of a mob that followed the fingers of Nebuchadnezzar: a mob of
one hand and one plan.
Stones of a circle of hills at Athens, staircases of a mountain in Peru, scattered clans of
marble dragons in China: each a mob on the rim of a sunrise: hammers and wagons
have them now.
Locks and gates of Panama? The Union Pacific crossing deserts and tunneling
mountains? The Woolworth on land and the Titanic at sea? Lighthouses blinking a coast
line from Labrador to Key West? Pig iron bars piled on a barge whistling in a fog off
Sheboygan? A mob: hammers and wagons have them to-morrow.
The mob? A typhoon tearing loose an island from thousand-year moorings and
bastions, shooting a volcanic ash with a fire tongue that licks up cities and peoples.
Layers of worms eating rocks and forming loam and valley floors for potatoes, wheat,
watermelons.
The mob? A jag of lightning, a geyser, a gravel mass loosening…
The mob … kills or builds … the mob is Attila or Ghengis Khan, the mob is Napoleon,
Lincoln.
I am born in the mob—I die in the mob—the same goes for you—I don’t care who you
are.
I cross the sheets of fire in No Man’s land for you, my brother—I slip a steel tooth into
your throat, you my brother—I die for you and I kill you—It is a twisted and gnarled
thing, a crimson wool:
One more arch of stars,
In the night of our mist,
In the night of our tears.
Adelaide Crapsey
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.
