Jabberers
I RISE out of my depths with my language. You rise out of your depths with your language. Two tongues from the depths, Alike only as a yellow cat and a green parrot are
Harrison Street Court
I heard a woman’s lips Speaking to a companion Say these words: “A woman what hustles Never keeps nothin’ For all her hustlin’. Somebody always gets What she goes on the street for. If
Stripes
POLICEMAN in front of a bank 3 A. M. … lonely. Policeman State and Madison… high noon… mobs… cars… parcels… lonely. Woman in suburbs… keeping night watch on a sleeping typhoid patient… only a
Gone
Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town. Far off Everybody loved her. So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold On a dream she wants. Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.
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
Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn
SMOKE of autumn is on it all. The streamers loosen and travel. The red west is stopped with a gray haze. They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks, They make a long-tailed
Cups of Coffee
THE HAGGARD woman with a hacking cough and a deathless love whispers of white Flowers… in your poem you pour like a cup of coffee, Gabriel. The slim girl whose voice was lost in
Memoir
We look on the shoulders filling the stage of the Chicago Auditorium. A fat mayor has spoken much English and the mud of his speech is crossed with quicksilver hisses elusive and rapid from
The Harbor
PASSING through huddled and ugly walls By doorways where women Looked from their hunger-deep eyes, Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands, Out from the huddled and ugly walls, I came sudden, at the city’s edge,
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
Ice Handler
I KNOW an ice handler who wears a flannel shirt with Pearl buttons the size of a dollar, And he lugs a hundred-pound hunk into a saloon ice- Box, helps himself to cold ham
Still Life
COOL your heels on the rail of an observation car. Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour. Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops,
Palladiums
IN the newspaper office-who are the spooks? Who wears the mythic coat invisible? Who pussyfoots from desk to desk with a speaking forefinger? Who gumshoes amid the copy paper with a whispering thumb? Speak
Child Margaret
THE CHILD Margaret begins to write numbers on a Saturday morning, the first numbers formed under her wishing child fingers. All the numbers come well-born, shaped in figures assertive for a frieze in a
Chicks
THE CHICK in the egg picks at the shell, cracks open one oval world, and enters another oval world. “Cheep… cheep… cheep” is the salutation of the newcomer, the emigrant, the casual at the