Honey and Salt Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Honey and Salt

  Pass, Friend

  Alone and Not Alone

  Wingtip

  Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely

  Almanac

  Biography

  Anecdote of Hemlock for Two Athenians

  Dreaming Fool

  Lief the Lucky

  Bird Footprint

  Cahokia

  Buyers and Sellers

  City Number

  Chromo

  The Evening Sunsets Witness and Pass On

  Deep Sea Wandering

  Call the Next Witness

  Early Copper

  Atlas, How Have You Been?

  Cheap Rent

  Elm Buds

  Child Face

  Fog Numbers

  Evening Questions

  Fifty-Fifty

  Evening Sea Wind

  Forgotten Wars

  God Is No Gentleman

  Hunger and Cold

  Foxgloves

  Harvest

  Fame If Not Fortune

  Impasse

  Is Wisdom a Lot of Language?

  Keepsake Boxes

  Impossible Iambics

  Lackawanna Twilight

  If So Hap May Be

  Kisses, Can You Come Back Like Ghosts?

  Lake Michigan Morning

  New Weather

  Lesson

  Metamorphosis

  Love Beyond Keeping

  Moods

  Moon Rondeau

  Little Word, Little White Bird

  Offering and Rebuff

  Morning Glory Blue

  High Moments

  Mummy

  Old Hokusai Print

  One Parting

  Ever a Seeker

  Old Music for Quiet Hearts

  Personalia

  The Gong of Time

  Prairie Woodland

  Shadows Fall Blue on the Mountains

  Quotations

  Skyscrapers Stand Proud

  Pool of Bethesda

  First Sonata for Karlen Paula

  Thou Art Like a Flower

  Solo for Saturday Night Guitar

  Rose Bawn

  Speech

  Runaway Colors

  Out of the Rainbow End

  Sun Dancer

  Themes in Contrast

  Two Fish

  Smoke Shapes

  Three Shrines

  Variations on a Theme

  Timesweep

  About the Author

  Copyright 1953, © 1958, 1960, 1961, 1963 by Carl Sandburg

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information, storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-15-642165-8 (Harvest/HBJ pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-544-41693-2

  v1.0215

  Honey and Salt

  A bag of tricks—is it?

  And a game smoothies play?

  If you’re good with a deck of cards

  or rolling the bones—that helps?

  If you can tell jokes and be a chum

  and make an impression—that helps?

  When boy meets girl or girl meets boy—

  what helps?

  They all help: be cozy but not too cozy:

  be shy, bashful, mysterious, yet only so-so:

  then forget everything you ever heard about love

  for it’s a summer tan and a winter windburn

  and it comes as weather comes and you can’t change it:

  it comes like your face came to you, like your legs came

  and the way you walk, talk, hold your head and hands—

  and nothing can be done about it—you wait and pray.

  Is there any way of measuring love?

  Yes but not till long afterward

  when the beat of your heart has gone

  many miles, far into the big numbers.

  Is the key to love in passion, knowledge, affection?

  All three—along with moonlight, roses, groceries,

  givings and forgivings, gettings and forgettings,

  keepsakes and room rent,

  pearls of memory along with ham and eggs.

  Can love be locked away and kept hid?

  Yes and it gathers dust and mildew

  and shrivels itself in shadows

  unless it learns the sun can help,

  snow, rain, storms can help—

  birds in their one-room family nests

  shaken by winds cruel and crazy—

  they can all help:

  lock not away your love nor keep it hid.

  How comes the first sign of love?

  In a chill, in a personal sweat,

  in a you-and-me, us, us two,

  In a couple of answers,

  an amethyst haze on the horizon,

  two dance programs criss-crossed,

  jackknifed initials interwoven,

  five fresh violets lost in sea salt,

  birds flying at single big moments

  in and out a thousand windows,

  a horse, two horses, many horses,

  a silver ring, a brass cry,

  a golden gong going ong ong ong-ng-ng,

  pink doors closing one by one

  to sunset nightsongs along the west,

  shafts and handles of stars,

  folds of moonmist curtains,

  winding and unwinding wips of fogmist.

  How long does love last?

  As long as glass bubbles handled with care

  or two hot-house orchids in a blizzard

  or one solid immovable steel anvil

  tempered in sure inexorable welding—

  or again love might last as

  six snowflakes, six hexagonal snowflakes,

  six floating hexagonal flakes of snow

  or the oaths between hydrogen and oxygen

  in one cup of spring water

  or the eyes of bucks and does

  or two wishes riding on the back of a

  morning wind in winter

  or one corner of an ancient tabernacle

  held sacred for personal devotions

  or dust yes dust in a little solemn heap

  played on by changing winds.

  There are sanctuaries

  holding honey and salt.

  There are those who

  spill and spend.

  There are those who

  search and save.

  And love may be a quest

  with silence and content.

  Can you buy love?

  Sure every day with money, clothes, candy,

  with promises, flowers, big-talk,

  with laughter, sweet-talk, lies,

  every day men and women buy love

  and take it away and things happen

  and they study about it

  and the longer they look at it

  the more it isn’t love they bought at all:

  bought love is a guaranteed imitation.

  Can you sell love?

  Yes you can sell it and take the price

  and think it over

  and look again at the price

  and cry and cry to yourself

  and wonder who was selling what and why
.

  Evensong lights floating black night waters,

  a lagoon of stars washed in velvet shadows,

  a great storm cry from white sea-horses—

  these moments cost beyond all prices.

  Bidden or unbidden? how comes love?

  Both bidden and unbidden, a sneak and a shadow,

  a dawn in a doorway throwing a dazzle

  or a sash of light in a blue fog,

  a slow blinking of two red lanterns in river mist

  or a deep smoke winding one hump of a mountain

  and the smoke becomes a smoke known to your own

  twisted individual garments:

  the winding of it gets into your walk, your hands,

  your face and eyes.

  Pass, Friend

  The doors of the morning must open.

  The keys of the night are not thrown away.

  I who have loved morning know its doors.

  I who have loved night know its keys.

  Alone and Not Alone

  I

  There must be a place

  a room and a sanctuary

  set apart for silence

  for shadows and roses

  holding aware in walls

  the sea and its secrets

  gong clamor gone still

  in a long deep sea-wash

  aware always of gongs

  vanishing before shadows

  of roses repeating themes

  of ferns standing still

  till wind blows over them:

  great hunger may bring these

  into one little room

  set apart for silence

  II

  There must be substance here

  related to old communions of

  hungering men and women—

  brass is a hard lean metal

  gold is the most ductile metal—

  they speak to each other not often

  they melt and fuse

  only in the crucible of this communion

  only in the dangers of high moments—

  they moan as mist before wind

  III

  The shuttlings of dawn color go soft

  weaving out of the night of black ice

  with crimson ramblers

  up the latticed ladders of daytime arriving.

  The riders of the sea the long white horses

  they send their plungers obedient to the moon

  in a dedicated path of foam and rainbows.

  The praise of any slow red moonrise should be

  slow.

  There are storm winds who bow down to

  nothing.

  They go on relentless under command and

  release

  sent out to do their hammering whirls of storm.

  There are sunset flames inviting prayer and

  sharing.

  There are time pieces having silence between

  chimes.

  Children of the wind keep their childish ways.

  The wisps of blue in a smoke wreath are mortal.

  The keepers of wisdom testify a heap of ashes

  means whatever was there went out burning.

  Wingtip

  The birds—are they worth remembering?

  Is flight a wonder and one wingtip a

  space marvel?

  When will man know what birds know?

  Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely

  love is a deep and a dark and a lonely

  and you take it deep take it dark

  and take it with a lonely winding

  and when the winding gets too lonely

  then may come the windflowers

  and the breath of wind over many flowers

  winding its way out of many lonely flowers

  waiting in rainleaf whispers

  waiting in dry stalks of noon

  wanting in a music of windbreaths

  so you can take love as it comes keening

  as it comes with a voice and a face

  and you make a talk of it

  talking to yourself a talk worth keeping

  and you put it away for a keen keeping

  and you find it to be a hoarding

  and you give it away and yet it stays hoarded

  like a book read over and over again

  like one book being a long row of books

  like leaves of windflowers bending low

  and bending to be never broken

  Almanac

  Scrutinize the Scorpion constellation

  and see where a hook of stars

  ends with a lonely star.

  Go to the grey sea horizon

  and ask for a message

  and listen and wait.

  See whether the conundrums

  of a heavy land fog

  either sing or talk.

  Let only a small cry come

  in behalf of a clean sunrise:

  the sun performs so often.

  Speak to the branches of spring

  and the surprise of blossoms:

  they too hope for a good year.

  Search the first winter snowstorm

  for a symphonic arrangement:

  it is always there.

  Take an alphabet of gold or mud and spell

  as you wish any words: kiss me, kill me,

  love, hate, ice, thought, victory.

  Read the numbers on your wrist watch

  and ask: is being born, being loved,

  being dead, nothing but numbers?

  Biography

  A biography, sirs, should begin—with the breath of a

  man

  when his eyes first meet the light of day—then working

  on

  through to the death when the light of day is gone:

  so the biography then is finished—unless you reverse

  the order

  and begin with the death and work back to the birth—

  starting the life with a coffin, moving back to a cradle—

  in which case, sirs, the biography has arrived, is

  completed

  when you have your subject born, except for ancestry,

  lineage,

  forbears, pedigree, blood, breed, bones, backgrounds—

  and these, sirs, may be carried far.

  Anecdote of Hemlock for Two Athenians

  The grizzled Athenian ordered to hemlock,

  Ordered to a drink and lights out,

  Had a friend he never refused anything.

  “Let me drink too,” the friend said.

  And the grizzled Athenian answered,

  “I never yet refused you anything.”

  “I am short of hemlock enough for two,”

  The head executioner interjected,

  “There must be more silver for more hemlock.”

  “Somebody pay this man for the drinks of death.”

  The grizzled Athenian told his friends.

  Who fished out the ready cash wanted.

  “Since one cannot die on free cost at Athens,

  Give this man his money,” were the words

  Of the man named Phocion, the grizzled Athenian.

  Yes, there are men who know how to die in a grand way.

  There are men who make their finish worth mentioning.

  Dreaming Fool

  I was the first of the fools

  (So I dreamed)

  And all the fools of the world

  were put into me and I was

  the biggest fool of all.

  Others were fools in the morning

  Or in the evening or on Saturdays

  Or odd days like Friday the Thirteenth

  But me—I was a fool every day in the week

  And when asleep I was the sleeping fool.

  (So I dreamed.)

  Lief the Lucky

  Lief Ericson crossed the sea

  to get away from a woman—

  did he?

  I have looked deep into the cist
erns of the stars—

  said Lief—and the stars too, every one was a struggler.

  My neck shall not be broken without a little battle—

  said Lief—and I shall always sing a little in tough weather.

  I hunted alligators on the moon and they had excellent teeth for grinding even as the camels had excellent humps for humping—so ran one of his dreams.

  He told the crew of a souse who said, Get me drunk and have some fun with me—and his mood changed and he told them it would be grand to travel the sky in a chariot of fire like Elijah.

  He saw a soft milk white horse on the, top cone of an iceberg looking for a place to slide down to pearl purple sea foam—and he murmured, “I’ve been lonely too, though never so lonely one wind wouldn’t take me home to the four winds.”