Cornhuskers / Carl Sandburg [electronic text]

HAUNTS

VALLEY SONG

Your eyes and the valley are memories. Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl. It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline. It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.

I will see you again to-morrow. I will see you again in a million years. I will never know your dark eyes again. These are three ghosts I keep. These are three sumach-red dogs I run with.

All of it wraps and knots to a riddle: I have the moon, the timberline, and you. All three are gone—and I keep all three.

IN TALL GRASS

BEES and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner—a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.

And I ask no better a winding sheet (over the earth and under the sun.)

Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.

Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey—who loses and remembers?—who keeps and forgets?

In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep.

UPSTAIRS

I TOO have a garret of old playthings. I have tin soldiers with broken arms upstairs. I have a wagon and the wheels gone upstairs. I have guns and a drum, a jumping-jack and a magic lantern. And dust is on them and I never look at them upstairs. I too have a garret of old playthings.

MONOSYLLABIC

LET me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord. Yesterday I loosed a snarl 'of words on a fool, on a child. To-day, let me be monosyllabic…a crony of old men who wash sunlight in their fingers and enjoy slow-pacing clocks.

FILMS

I HAVE kept all, not one is thrown away, not one given to the ragman, not one thrust in a corner with a "P-f-f." The red ones and the blue, the long ones in stripes, and each of the little black and white checkered ones. Keep them: I tell my heart: keep them another year, another ten years: they will be wanted again. They came once, they came easy, they came like a first white flurry of snow in late October, Like any sudden, presumptuous, beautiful thing, and they were cheap at the price, cheap like snow. Here a red one and there a long one in yellow stripes, O there shall be no ragman have these yet a year, yet ten years.

KREISLER

SELL me a violin, mister, of old mysterious wood. Sell me a fiddle that has kissed dark nights on the forehead where men kiss sisters they love. Sell me dried wood that has ached with passion clutching the knees and arms of a storm. Sell me horsehair and rosin that has sucked at the breasts of the morning sun for milk. Sell me something crushed in the heartsblood of pain readier than ever for one more song.

THE SEA HOLD

THE sea is large, The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men. Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land…five white dice rolled from a tube,

Not so long ago…the sea was large… And to-day the sea has lost nothing…it keeps all,

I am a loon about the sea, I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I forget so many sea songs and sea cries,

I am a loon about the sea, So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper shack trembling in a sand storm, The sea knows more about them than they know themselves. They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go.

The sea is large. The sea must know more than any of us.

GOLDWING MOTH

A GOLDWING moth is between the scissors and the ink bottle on the desk Last night it flew hundreds of circles around a glass bulb and a flame wire. The wings are a soft gold; it is the gold of illuminated initials in manuscripts of the medieval monks.

LOIN CLOTH

BODY of Jesus taken down from the cross Carved in ivory by a lover of Christ, It is a child's handful you are here, The breadth of a man's finger, And this ivory loin cloth Speaks an interspersal in the day's work, The carver's prayer and whim And Christ-love.

HEMLOCK AND CEDAR

THIN sheets of blue smoke among white slabs … near the shingle mill … winter morning. Falling of a dry leaf might be heard… circular steel tears through a log. Slope of woodland … brown … soft… tinge of blue such as pansy eyes. Farther, field fires … funnel of yellow smoke … spellings of other yellow in corn stubble. Bobsled on a down-hill road … February snow mud …horses steaming…Oscar the driver sings ragtime under a spot of red seen a mile … the red wool yarn of Oscar's stocking cap is seen from the shingle mill to the ridge of hemlock and cedar.

SUMMER SHIRT SALE

THE summer shirt sale of a downtown haberdasher is glorified in a show-window slang: everybody understands the language: red dots, yellow circles, blue anchors, and dove-brown hooks, these perform explosions in color: stripes and checks fight for the possession of front lines and salients: detectives, newsies, teameoes, niggers, all stop, look, and listen: the shirt sale and the show window kick at the street with a noise joyous as a clog dancer: the ensemble is a challenge to the ghost who walks on paydays.

MEDALLION

THE brass medallion profile of your face I keep always. It is not jingling with loose change in my pockets. It is not stuck up in a show place on the office wall. I carry it in a special secret pocket in the day And it is under my pillow at night. The brass came from a long ways off: it was up against hell and high water, fire and flood, before the face was put on it. It is the side of a head; a woman wishes; a woman waits; a woman swears behind silent lips that the sea will bring home what is gone.

BRICKLAYER LOVE

I THOUGHT of killing myself because I am only a bricklayer and you a woman who loves the man who runs a drug store.

I don't care like I used to; I lay bricks straighter than I used to and I sing slower handling the trowel afternoons.

When the sun is in my eyes and the ladders are shaky and the mortar boards go wrong, I think of you.

ASHURNATSIRPAL III

(From Babylonian tablet, 4,000 years Before Christ)

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.

MAMMY HUMS

THIS is the song I rested with: The fight shoulder of a strong man I leaned on. The face of the rain that drizzled on the short neck of a canal boat. The eyes of a child who slept while death went over and under. The petals of peony pink that fluttered in a shot of wind come and gone.

This is the song I rested with: Head, heels, and fingers rocked to the nigger mammy humming of it, to the mile-off steamboat landing whistle of it.

The murmurs run with bees' wings in a late summer sun. They go and come with white surf slamming on a beach all day.

Get this. And then you may sleep with a late afternoon slumber sun. Then you may slip your head in an elbow knowing nothing—only sleep. If so you sleep in the house of our song, If so you sleep under the apple trees of our song, Then the face of sleep must be the one face you were looking for.

BRINGERS

COVER me over In dusk and dust and dreams.

Cover me over And leave me alone.

Cover me over, You tireless, great.

Hear me and cover me, Bringers of dusk and dust and dreams.

CRIMSON RAMBLER

Now that a crimson rambler begins to crawl over the house of our two lives—

Now that a red curve winds across the shingles—

Now that hands washed in early sunrises climb and spill scarlet on a white lattice weave—

Now that a loop of blood is written on our roof and reaching around a chimney—

How are the two lives of this house to keep strong hands and strong hearts?

HAUNTS

THERE are places I go when I am strong. One is a marsh pool where I used to go with a long-ear hound-dog. One is a wild crabapple tree; I was there a moonlight night with a girl. The dog is gone; the girl is gone; I go to these places when there is no other place to go.

HAVE ME

HAVE me in the blue and the sun. Have me on the open sea and the mountains.

When I go into the grass of the sea floor, I will go alone. This is where I came from—the chlorine and the salt are blood and bones. It is here the nostrils rush the air to the lungs. It is here oxygen clamors to be let in. And here in the root grass of the sea floor I will go alone.

Love goes far. Here love ends. Have me in the blue and the sun.

FIRE DREAMS

(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day)

I REMEMBER here by the fire, In the flickering reds and saffrons, They came in a ramshackle tub, Pilgrims in tall hats, Pilgrims of iron jaws, Drifting by weeks on beaten seas, And the random chapters say They were glad and sang to God.

And so Since the iron-jawed men sat down And said, "Thanks, O God," For life and soup and a little less Than a hobo handout to-day, Since gray winds blew gray patterns of sleet on Plymouth Rock, Since the iron-jawed men sang "Thanks, O God," You and I, O Child of the West, Remember more than ever November and the hunter's moon, November and the yellow-spotted hills.

And so In the name of the iron-jawed men I will stand up and say yes till the finish is come and gone. God of all broken hearts, empty hands, sleeping soldiers, God of all star-flung beaches of night sky, I and my love-child stand up together to-day and sing: "Thanks, O God."

BABY FACE

WHITE MOON comes in on a baby face. The shafts across her bed are flimmering.

Out on the land White Moon shines, Shines and glimmers against gnarled shadows, All silver to slow twisted shadows Falling across the long road that runs from the house.

Keep a little of your beauty And some of your flimmering silver For her by the window to-night Where you come in, White Moon.

THE YEAR

I

A STORM of white petals, Buds throwing open baby fists Into hands of broad flowers.

II

Red roses running upward, Clambering to the clutches of life Soaked in crimson.

III

Rabbles of tattered leaves

Holding golden flimsy hopes Against the tramplings Into the pits and gullies.

IV

Hoarfrost and silence: Only the muffling Of winds dark and lonesome— Great lullabies to the long sleepers.

DRUMNOTES 1 1.1

DAYS of the dead men, Danny. Drum for the dead, drum on your remembering heart.

Jaurès, a great love-heart of France, a slug of lead in the red valves. Kitchener of Khartoum, tall, cold, proud, a shark's mouthful. Franz Josef, the old man of forty haunted kingdoms, in a tomb with the Hapsburg fathers, moths eating a green uniform to tatters, worms taking all and leaving only bones and gold buttons, bones and iron crosses. Jack London, Jim Riley, Verhaeren, riders to the republic of dreams.

Days of the dead, Danny. Drum on your remembering heart.

Copyright. Dodd, Mead & Co.

MOONSET

LEAVES of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west. Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures. The moon's good-by ends pictures. The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now. Only dark listening to dark.

GARDEN WIRELESS

How many feet ran with sunlight, water, and air?

What little devils shaken of laughter, cramming their little ribs with chuckles,

Fixed this lone red tulip, a woman's mouth of passion kisses, a nun's mouth of sweet thinking, here topping a straight line of green, a pillar stem?

Who hurled this bomb of red caresses?—nodding balloon-film shooting its wireless every fraction of a second these June days: Love me before I die; Love me—love me now.

HANDFULS

BLOSSOMS of babies Blinking their stories Come soft On the dusk and the babble; Little red gamblers, Handfuls that slept in the dust.

Summers of rain, Winters of drift, Tell off the years; And they go back Who came soft— Back to the sod, To silence and dust; Gray gamblers, Handfuls again.

COOL TOMBS

WHEN Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin… in the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes … in the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? … in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns … tell me if the lovers are losers … tell me if any get more than the lovers … in the dust …. in the cool tombs.

Notes

• 1 1.1

  Copyright, Dodd, Mead and Co.