Many birds and the beating of wings Make a flinging reckless hum In the early morning at the rocks Above the blue pool Where the gray shadows swim lazy. In your blue eyes, O

I REMEMBER the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness. And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and

YOU never come back. I say good-by when I see you going in the doors, The hopeless open doors that call and wait And take you then for how many cents a day? How

THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson. The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab. And the people who sin the sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

THE FINE cloth of your love might be a fabric of Egypt, Something Sinbad, the sailor, took away from robbers, Something a traveler with plenty of money might pick up And bring home and

THE BUFFALOES are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone. Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads

DREAMS in the dusk, Only dreams closing the day And with the day’s close going back To the gray things, the dark things, The far, deep things of dreamland. Dreams, only dreams in the

LIPS half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.

GOLD of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon, Canada thistle blue and flimmering larkspur blue, Tomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts, Shining five and six in a row

In western fields of corn and northern timber lands, They talk about me, a saloon with a soul, The soft red lights, the long curving bar, The leather seats and dim corners, Tall brass

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

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

THE TELESCOPE picks off star dust On the clean steel sky and sends it to me. The telephone picks off my voice and Sends it cross country a thousand miles. The eyes in my

NAPOLEON shifted, Restless in the old sarcophagus And murmured to a watchguard: “Who goes there?” “Twenty-one million men, Soldiers, armies, guns, Twenty-one million Afoot, horseback, In the air, Under the sea.” And Napoleon turned

IN Abraham Lincoln’s city, Where they remember his lawyer’s shingle, The place where they brought him Wrapped in battle flags, Wrapped in the smoke of memories From Tallahassee to the Yukon, The place now

IT’S going to come out all right—do you know? The sun, the birds, the grass—they know. They get along—and we’ll get along. Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting And the

OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this: You took little children away from the sun and the dew, And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great

THE GRAVE of Alexander Hamilton is in Trinity yard at the end of Wall Street. The grave of Robert Fulton likewise is in Trinity yard where Wall Street stops. And in this yard stenogs,

STYLE go ahead talking about style. You can tell where a man gets his style just As you can tell where Pavlowa got her legs Or Ty Cobb his batting eye. Go on talking.

TEN minutes now I have been looking at this. I have gone by here before and wondered about it. This is a bronze memorial of a famous general Riding horseback with a flag and

WHAT cry of peach blossoms let loose on the air today I heard with my face thrown in the pink-white of it all? in the red whisper of it all? What man I heard

THE DOUBLE moon, one on the high back drop of the west, one on the curve of the river face, The sky moon of fire and the river moon of water, I am taking

WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek. Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices, Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets, The

IN the morning, a Sunday morning, shadows of sea and adumbrants of rock in her eyes… horseback in leather boots and leather gauntlets by the sea. In the evening, a Sunday evening, a rope

SNOW took us away from the smoke valleys into white mountains, we saw velvet blue cows eating a vermillion grass and they gave us a pink milk. Snow changes our bones into fog streamers

To the Williamson Brothers HIGH noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue Asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors. Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching Play of sun-fire to their skin

THERE was a wild pigeon came often to Hinkley’s timber. Gray wings that wrote their loops and triangles on the walnuts and the hazel. There was a wild pigeon. There was a summer came

BURY this old Illinois farmer with respect. He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields. Now he goes on a long sleep. The wind he listened to

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

Shaken, The blossoms of lilac, And shattered, The atoms of purple. Green dip the leaves, Darker the bark, Longer the shadows. Sheer lines of poplar Shimmer with masses of silver And down in a

MRS. GABRIELLE GIOVANNITTI comes along Peoria Street Every morning at nine o’clock With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes Looking straight ahead to find the way for her old feet.

FACES of two eternities keep looking at me. One is Omar Khayam and the red stuff Wherein men forget yesterday and to-morrow And remember only the voices and songs, The stories, newspapers and fights

WHAT does the hangman think about When he goes home at night from work? When he sits down with his wife and Children for a cup of coffee and a Plate of ham and

I. CHICKENS I am The Great White Way of the city: When you ask what is my desire, I answer: “Girls fresh as country wild flowers, With young faces tired of the cows and

I LOVE your faces I saw the many years I drank your milk and filled my mouth With your home talk, slept in your house And was one of you. But a fire burns

IA STORM of white petals, Buds throwing open baby fists Into hands of broad flowers. IIRed roses running upward, Clambering to the clutches of life Soaked in crimson. IIIRabbles of tattered leaves Holding golden

[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two Days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.] COME to me only with playthings now. . . A

THE SHALE and water thrown together so-so first of all, Then a potter’s hand on the wheel and his fingers shaping the jug; out of the mud a mouth and a handle; Slimpsy, loose

HATS, where do you belong? what is under you? On the rim of a skyscraper’s forehead I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats: Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle

TWO fishes swimming in the sea, Two birds flying in the air, Two chisels on an anvil-maybe. Beaten, hammered, laughing blue steel to each other-maybe. Sure I would rather be a chisel with you

I SAW a telegram handed a two hundred pound man at a desk. And the little scrap of paper charged the air like a set of crystals in a chemist’s tube to a whispering

TOMB of a millionaire, A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen, Place of the dead where they spend every year The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars For upkeep and flowers To keep fresh the memory of

RUM tiddy um, tiddy um, tiddy um tum tum. My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves. I feel like tickling you under the chin-honey-and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross

Close-mouthed you sat five thousand years and never Let out a whisper. Processions came by, marchers, asking questions you Answered with grey eyes never blinking, shut lips Never talking. Not one croak of anything

IN a jeweler’s shop I saw a man beating Out thin sheets of gold. I heard a woman Laugh many years ago. Under a peach tree I saw petals scattered .. torn strips of

I cannot tell you now; When the wind’s drive and whirl Blow me along no longer, And the wind’s a whisper at last Maybe I’ll tell you then some other time. When the rose’s

I ASKED the Mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week. And the Mayor of Gary answered more workmen steal time on the job in Gary than any other place in

DESOLATE and lone All night long on the lake Where fog trails and mist creeps, The whistle of a boat Calls and cries unendingly, Like some lost child In tears and trouble Hunting the

WHAT do we see here in the sand dunes of the white Moon alone with our thoughts, Bill, Alone with our dreams, Bill, soft as the women tying Scarves around their heads dancing, Alone

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