The Lawyers Know Too Much

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1. The Lawyers' Ways I’ve been list’nin’ to them lawyers In the court house up the street, An’ I’ve come to the conclusion That I’m most completely beat. Fust one feller riz to argy, An’ he boldly waded in As he dressed the tremblin’ pris’ner In a coat o’ deep-dyed sin. Why, he painted him all over In a […]...
2. Galoots GALOOTS, you hairy, hankering, Snousle on the bones you eat, chew at the gristle and lick the last of it. Grab off the bones in the paws of other galoots-hook your claws in their sleazy mouths-snap and run. If long-necks sit on their rumps and sing wild cries to the winter moon, chasing their tails […]...
3. Alzheimer's My grandmother’s teeth stare at her From a mason jar on the nightstand. The radio turns itself on, Sunlight crawls through the window, And she thinks she feels her bright blue eyes Rolling out her head. She’s certain her blood has turned to dirt, That beetles haunt the dark hollow of her bones. The clock […]...
4. Balloon Faces THE BALLOONS hang on wires in the Marigold Gardens. They spot their yellow and gold, they juggle their blue and red, they float their faces on the face of the sky. Balloon face eaters sit by hundreds reading the eat cards, asking, “What shall we eat?”-and the waiters, “Have you ordered?” they are sixty ballon […]...
5. The Drunkard's Funeral “Yes,” said the sister with the little pinched face, The busy little sister with the funny little tract: – “This is the climax, the grand fifth act. There rides the proud, at the finish of his race. There goes the hearse, the mourners cry, The respectable hearse goes slowly by. The wife of the dead […]...
6. Lawyer WHEN the jury files in to deliver a verdict after weeks of direct and cross examinations, hot clashes of lawyers and cool decisions of the judge, There are points of high silence-twiddling of thumbs is at an end-bailiffs near cuspidors take fresh chews of tobacco and wait-and the clock has a chance for its ticking […]...
7. Knucks 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 where the shaft of his tomb Points white against the blue prairie dome, In Abraham Lincoln’s city… I saw knucks In […]...
8. Hamlet Off-Stage: She Wheel Ophelia puked hourly dawn till dusk, Retching mucous slobber, then spewing air. Scum that I am, I never stopped thinking What a beauty: small Icelandic hooters, Femme d’Bumpers, on whom all fun depends. Woman’s the car, man the hood ornament. She lay there so sick she wasn’t human, More an engine blowing jello gaskets. Yet, […]...
9. 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....
10. Snow 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 caught by the wind and spelled into many dances. Six bits for a sniff of snow in the old days bought […]...
11. The Man Who Was Away The widow sought the lawyer’s room with children three in tow, She told the lawyer man her tale in tones of deepest woe. She said, “My husband took to drink for pains in his inside, And never drew a sober breath from then until he died. “He never drew a sober breath, he died without […]...
12. The Egg-Shell The wind took off with the sunset The fog came up with the tide, When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell With a little Blue Devil inside. “Sink,” she said, “or swim,” she said, “It’s all you will bet from me. And that is the finish of him!” she said And the Egg-shell […]...
13. 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 […]...
14. The New Ezekiel What, can these dead bones live, whose sap is dried By twenty scorching centuries of wrong? Is this the House of Israel, whose pride Is as a tale that’s told, an ancient song? Are these ignoble relics all that live Of psalmist, priest, and prophet? Can the breath Of very heaven bid these bones revive, […]...
15. Pals Take a hold now On the silver handles here, Six silver handles, One for each of his old pals. Take hold And lift him down the stairs, Put him on the rollers Over the floor of the hearse. Take him on the last haul, To the cold straight house, The level even house, To the […]...
16. The Morning Half-Life Blues Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work In fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur. The shop windows snicker Flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford: You are not pretty enough, not pretty enough. Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning We dream of the stop on the subway […]...
17. The Way Things Work is by admitting Or opening away. This is the simplest form Of current: Blue Moving through blue; Blue through purple; The objects of desire Opening upon themselves Without us; the objects of faith. The way things work Is by solution, Resistance lessened or Increased and taken Advantage of. The way things work Is that we […]...
18. Carlovingian Dreams COUNT these reminiscences like money. The Greeks had their picnics under another name. The Romans wore glad rags and told their neighbors, “What of it?” The Carlovingians hauling logs on carts, they too Stuck their noses in the air and stuck their thumbs to their noses And tasted life as a symphonic dream of fresh […]...
19. To Certain Journeymen UNDERTAKERS, hearse drivers, grave diggers, I speak to you as one not afraid of your business. You handle dust going to a long country, You know the secret behind your job is the same whether You lower the coffin with modern, automatic machinery, Well-oiled and noiseless, or whether the Body is laid in by naked […]...
20. A koestler on the human brain the man and the horse and the crocodile Lay down on the couch together The man said This isn’t going to work The horse neighed I love you The crocodile Slimy as ever Neither complained nor adored Idly It snapped its jaws And got on with the feast...
21. Cavalier Tunes: Boot and Saddle Boot, saddle, to horse and away! Rescue my Castle, before the hot day Brightens to blue from its silvery gray, (Chorus) Boot, saddle, to horse, and away! Ride past the suburbs, asleep as you’d say; Many’s the friend there, will listen and pray “God’s luck to gallants that strike up the lay (Chorus) Boot, saddle, […]...
22. Boot And Saddle Boot, saddle, to horse, and away! Rescue my Castle, before the hot day Brightens the blue from its silvery grey, (Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!” Ride past the suburbs, asleep as you’d say; Many’s the friend there, will listen and pray “God’s luck to gallants that strike up the lay, (Chorus) “Boot, saddle, […]...
23. I Hear America Singing I HEAR America singing, the varied carols I hear; Those of mechanics-each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong; The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work; The boatman singing what belongs to him in […]...
24. Skyscraper BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and Has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into It and they mingle among its twenty floors and are Poured out again back to the streets, prairies and Valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured […]...
25. What care the Dead, for Chanticleer What care the Dead, for Chanticleer What care the Dead for Day? ‘Tis late your Sunrise vex their face And Purple Ribaldry of Morning Pour as blank on them As on the Tier of Wall The Mason builded, yesterday, And equally as cool What care the Dead for Summer? The Solstice had no Sun Could […]...
26. Drumnotes 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 […]...
27. 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 […]...
28. Study Somewhere the long mellow note of the blackbird Quickens the unclasping hands of hazel, Somewhere the wind-flowers fling their heads back, Stirred by an impetuous wind. Some ways’ll All be sweet with white and blue violet. (Hush now, hush. Where am I?-Biuret-) On the green wood’s edge a shy girl hovers From out of the […]...
29. Sanctuary This is the bricklayer; hear the thud Of his heavy load dumped down on stone. His lustrous bricks are brighter than blood, His smoking mortar whiter than bone. Set each sharp-edged, fire-bitten brick Straight by the plumb-line’s shivering length; Make my marvelous wall so thick Dead nor living may shake its strength. Full as a […]...
30. All Distance Writing from Boston, where sky is simply Property, a flourish topping crowds Of condos and historic real estate, I’m trying to imagine blue sky: The first time, where it happened, What I was becoming. Being taken there By car, from a town so newly born that grass Still accounted all distance, an explanation Drawn in […]...
31. 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 […]...
32. Pods PEA pods cling to stems. Neponset, the village, Clings to the Burlington railway main line. Terrible midnight limiteds roar through Hauling sleepers to the Rockies and Sierras. The earth is slightly shaken And Neponset trembles slightly in its sleep....
33. Tract I will teach you my townspeople How to perform a funeral For you have it over a troop Of artists- Unless one should scour the world- You have the ground sense necessary. See! the hearse leads. I begin with a design for a hearse. For Christ’s sake not black- Nor white either – and not […]...
34. The Truth the Dead Know For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 And my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959 Gone, I say and walk from church, Refusing the stiff procession to the grave, Letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. We drive to the Cape. I […]...
35. A Winter Ride Who shall declare the joy of the running! Who shall tell of the pleasures of flight! Springing and spurning the tufts of wild heather, Sweeping, wide-winged, through the blue dome of light. Everything mortal has moments immortal, Swift and God-gifted, immeasurably bright. So with the stretch of the white road before me, Shining snowcrystals rainbowed […]...
36. Dream Song 43: 'Oyez, oyez!' The Man Who Did Not Deliver ‘Oyez, oyez!’ The Man Who Did Not Deliver Is before you for his deliverance, my lords. He stands, as charged For This by banks, That cops, by lawyers, by Publishingers for Them. I doubt he’ll make Old bones. Be. I warned him, of a summer night: consist, Consist. Ex-wives roar. Further, the Crown holds that […]...
37. No Beer, No Work The shades of night was fallin’ slow As through New York a guy did go And nail on ev’ry barroom door A card that this here motter bore: “No beer, no work.” His brow was sad, his mouth was dry; It was the first day of July, And where, all parched and scorched it hung, […]...
38. Manitoba Childe Roland 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 Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was […]...
39. The Black Tower Say that the men of the old black tower, Though they but feed as the goatherd feeds, Their money spent, their wine gone sour, Lack nothing that a soldier needs, That all are oath-bound men: Those banners come not in. There in the tomb stand the dead upright, But winds come up from the shore: […]...
40. End of Summer An agitation of the air, A perturbation of the light Admonished me the unloved year Would turn on its hinge that night. I stood in the disenchanted field Amid the stubble and the stones Amaded, while a small worm lisped to me The song of my marrow-bones. Blue poured into summer blue, A hawk broke […]...