The People, Yes Read online

  The refuse of humanity, the offscourings, the encumberings,

  They are who?

  They are those who have forgotten work and the price

  At which life goes on.

  They live in shambles overly foul and in mansions overly

  Swept and garnished.

  The flowing of the stream clears it of pollution.

  77

  The bottom of the sea accommodates mountain ranges.

  This is how deep the sea is

  And the toss and drip of the mystery of the people

  And the sting of sea-drip.

  In the long catacombs of moss fish linger and move

  Hearing the cries of dolphins while they too wander.

  This is the depot of lost and unreclaimed baggage,

  Colosseums of dead men’s bones and the trunks of the dead men each with a lock of hair, a ringlet of somebody’s hair in a locket, and a pack of love letters and a deck of cards and a testament and leather straps and brass buckles and brass locks holding their fasteners on the trunks.

  78

  What did Hiamovi, the red man, Chief of

  the Cheyennes, have?

  To a great chief at Washington and to a

  chief of peoples across the waters,

  Hiamovi spoke:

  “There are birds of many colors—red, blue,

  green, yellow,

  Yet it is all one bird.

  There are horses of many colors—brown,

  black, yellow, white,

  Yet it is all one horse.

  So cattle, so all living things, animals,

  flowers, trees.

  So men in this land, where once were only

  Indians, are now men of many colors—

  white, black, yellow, red.

  Yet all one people.

  That this should come to pass was in the

  heart of the Great Mystery.

  It is right thus—and everywhere there

  shall be peace.”

  Thus Hiamovi, out of a tarnished and weather-

  worn heart of old gold, out of a living

  dawn gold.

  What is the float of life that goes by us

  in certain moods of autumn smoke

  when tall trees seem in the possession of phantoms

  carrying a scheme of haze

  inevitably past changing sunsets

  into a moist moonlight

  and beyond into a baffling moonset

  on a mist horizon?

  These devices are made of what color and air?

  And how far and in how does man make them himself?

  What is this pool of reverie

  this blur of contemplation

  wherein man is brother to mud and gold

  to bug and bird

  to behemoths and constellations?

  In the evening twilight in the skyscraper office

  and the hoom hoom of a big steamboat docking

  and the auto horns and the corner newsboys

  only half heard as far up as sixteen floors

  the doctor meditated and spoke: “The rich come afraid to die, afraid to have their throats looked into, their intestines prodded. It hurts. Their power of resistance is gone. They can’t stand pain. Things go wrong, they come into my office and ask what is the matter. I have to be careful how I say, ‘You are growing old, that is all, everybody grows old, we all have to die.’ That scares them. They don’t want to grow old. They tell me I must find a way to keep them from growing old. They don’t want to die. They tell me they will pay me to find a way so they won’t have to die.” Thus in the evening twilight, in the hoom hoom and the auto horns and the corner newsboys only half heard up sixteen floors.

  And he went on:

  “I was in a hospital the other day. A man blind thirty-five years could see again. We walked out together. And up the street he saw a horse. He asked, ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘It’s a horse—didn’t you ever see a horse before?’ He answered, ‘No, this is the first time I ever saw a horse.’”

  Thus in the evening twilight

  in the hoom hoom.

  And the doctor went on: “A few weeks ago came a woman saying she had been to a great symphony concert, going out to walk miles, still hearing the grand crashes of that music, walking home on air, telling me, ‘I went to bed and wept for three weeks—what is the matter with me?’ I had to tell her, ‘Only a slight matter. You will be well again when you learn to listen to the ticking of the clock.’”

  To a lawyer who came saying he had undertaken more financial reorganizations than there was time for and his nerves were shot the doctor talked long about wony, gave the lawyer a box and 100 black beans: “Each morning you drop a bean in the box and say, ‘Worry is in the bean and the bean is in the box.’”

  In the hoom hoom of the big steamboat docking the doctor said, “Silence is the great gratitude when bad music ends.”

  79

  In paper sacks the customers carry away millions of tons of goods daily except Sunday.

  And having used what they carry away in paper sacks they go back daily except Sunday for more millions of tons of useable goods transferred in paper sacks.

  And the trade experts look on and call it consumption while the people carrying the paper sacks have a way of alleging, “We have to eat, don’t we?”

  And once there was a man who considered how he might make a paper sack song and invent a paper sack dance. In the days of his youth he had worked in the pulp. Joined with other men and machines he had taken logs and cooked a mash and dried and flattened it out and kept flattening it till it was thin as paper and it was paper. And his sister in another mill had watched a machine and tended it; daily except Sunday it spat forth its stint of millions of paper sacks.

  And the brother and sister say to each other now, “We have made so many millions of paper sacks we know exactly the feelings and ideas of any one paper sack. One paper sack thinks just what another paper sack thinks. And now when our jobs are gone because bigger and better machines do what we used to do my sister and I say to each other: Hello, old paper sack. And we talk about how we are a couple of paper sacks thrown away and no longer wanted because there is no answer to the question: Why are paper sacks so cheap?

  “And we talk on and we decide we are something more than paper sacks. We have a right to live and a right to work and we have a right to say life ought to be good and life is more than paper sacks. And we will go anywhere and listen to any organizers and agitators who come to us saying: We speak to you as people and not as paper sacks.”

  In Gloversville, New York, a woman daylong made mittens and the faster she made the mittens the more the wages coming in for her and her children.

  And her hands became like mittens she said,

  And in the winter when she looked out one night

  Where the moon lighted a couple of evergreen trees:

  “My God! I look at evergreens in the moonlight

  and what are they? A pair of mittens.

  And what am I myself? Just a mitten.

  Only one more mitten, that’s all.

  My God! if I live a little longer in that mitten factory the whole world will be just a lot of mittens to me

  And at last I will be buried in a mitten and on my grave they will put up a mitten as a sign one more mitten is gone.”

  This was why she listened to the organizer of the glove and mitten workers’ union; maybe the union could do something.

  She would fight in the union ranks and see if somehow they could save her from seeing two evergreens at night in the moon as just another pair of mitts.

  80

  Deep in the dusty chattels of the tombs,

  Laden with luggage handed them

  By departing ghosts saying, “It’s yours, all yours,”

  They give their ghost imprint to the time they live in.

  They are to the people what they are to the sea,

  To the harvest moon, to the livi
ng grassroots,

  To the tides that wash them away babbling to some caretaker, “What time is it? where are we?”

  And time, since you ask, time is the story-teller you can’t shut up, he goes on.

  The king, like many a king, was a little coocoo, and hung up a challenge. Whoever would tell him a story so long that he couldn’t stand any more of it would marry his princess daughter. Otherwise the story-teller’s neck would be blemished with a gleaming ax-blade. The story-teller began on how grain elevators bulging with corn ran for miles while the locusts spread out many more miles and there was only one point of entry and egress for the crawling hordes of slithering locusts, only one place for a locust to go in and out. And one locust went in and brought out a grain of corn and another locust went in and brought out another grain of corn. And another locust went in and brought out another grain of corn. And another locust went in and brought out another grain of corn. And so on and so on till the king saw what he had let himself in for and speaking in the royal tone customary to kings he told the story-teller, “You win, the girl is yours.” And this was back in the old days when kings were kings and wore crowns and had crown jewels.

  Time? The story-teller you can’t shut up, he goes on.

  “Time is blind; man stupid.”

  Thus one of the cynics.

  “Time is relentless; man shrewd.”

  Thus one of the hopefuls.

  Time passes; man laughs at it.

  The sun-dial was one laugh.

  The wrist-watch is another.

  “Time? I can’t stop it but

  I can measure it.”

  81

  Chicago seems all fox and swine,

  Dreams interfused with smut, dung, hunger.

  Yet Chicago is not all belly and mouth and

  overwrought sex and lies and greed

  and snobs.

  Chicago has something over and beyond.

  Sometime the seeds and cross-fertilizations

  now moving in Chicago may inaugurate

  a crossroads of great gladness.

  The same goes for Omaha and points west,

  for Buffalo and points east.

  Out of the shopping crowds at State and Madison, hot with bundles and bargains,

  A humpty-dumpty runt of a man dived at high noon into a forest of rubbernecks craning at a skywriting plane telling you what cigarette to smoke next, what cigarette to buy,

  And he came up to say there was too much quick thinking and he would offer a little slow thinking:

  “From the museum mummies I came to these ghosts swirling around State and Madison, Forty-second and Fifth Avenue, and about all I learned was this, you can write it on a thumbnail:

  “There is a dead past and a blank future and the same humanity is in each and it’s all ham and eggs, dog eat dog, the toughest guts have their way, and they kill and kill to see who’ll get the most marbles, the most cocoanuts, the most little embossed pieces of paper.”

  And then he went on, wiping his chin with four fingers and a thumb, screwing his eyes to a thin slit, and correcting himself:

  “I take that back. Write it off as a loss. If the big arch of the sky were paper and the violet depths of the sea were ink, I could never live long enough to write the dreams of man and the dynamic drive of those dreams.

  “Who and what is man? He is Atlas and Thor and Yankee Doodle, an eagle, a lion, a rooster, a bear that walks like a man, an elephant, a moon-face, David and Goliath, Paul Bunyan and the Flying Dutchman, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Christ, the Equator and the Arctic Poles, holding in one hand the Bank of England and the Roman Catholic Church, in the other the Red Army and the Standard Oil Company, holding in easy reach the dogs of war and the doves of peace, the tigers of wrath and the horses of instruction.

  “Let me sell you my dreams. Take these dreams for whatever you want to pay me. You shall never be tired till the sea is tired. You shall never go weary till the land and the wind go weary. You will be hard as nails, soft as blue fog.

  “Man is born with rainbows in his heart and you’ll never read him unless you consider rainbows. He is a trouble shooter with big promises. He trades the Oklahoma roan mustang for a tub in the sky with wings falling falling in Alaska. Hard as a rock his head is an egg and ponders ponders. He is a phantasmagoria of crimson dawns and what it takes to build his dreams.”

  So the finish. He ceased from wiping his chin with four fingers and a thumb, ceased from screwing his eyes to a thin slit, ceased correcting himself.

  Then he vanished. In a wreath of blue smoke from a panatella seegar he was gone, a scholar, a clown, and a dreambook seller who had said enough for one day.

  Turning a corner he talked to himself about the dust of the knuckles of his great-grandfathers, how they once were hard as nails and could pick a vest-button with a bullet, and how his own little knuckles sometime would shiver into fine dust and how he wanted snowdrifts piled over him and the inscription: HERE NO ONE LIES BURIED.

  82

  I pledge my allegiance,

  say the munitions makers and the international bankers,

  I pledge my allegiance to this flag, that flag,

  any flag at all, of any country anywhere

  paying its bills and meeting interest on loans,

  one and indivisible,

  coming through with cash in payment as stipulated

  with liberty and justice for all,

  say the munitions makers and the international bankers.

  “Your million dollars, if you will pardon me,”

  said a polite shrimp, “came one of three

  ways. First, if you will pardon me, you

  took it somehow as profits within the law

  belonging to you, unless, second, you have

  it as a gift or bequest handed to you without

  your working for it, or unless, if you

  will pardon me, third and last, you took

  it, outside the law and yet beyond the

  reach of the law, as belonging to you

  rather than whoever had it before you

  got it from them.”

  What good is rain on a hard and sour soil?

  Why put a driller and seeder

  where the top soil is blown away?

  Why put your headlights on in bright noon?

  Why do favors where you know you get no thanks?

  Some have their finger nails pinked

  a regular shade, according to custom.

  Some, wearing pearls, have their finger-nails

  tinted, enameled and polished

  to match the precise color of their pearls.

  Those with oyster pearls shade to a crystal,

  others are touched with desert grey, sea green.

  And cosmetics volume last year was over a billion.

  83

  Who can make a poem of the depths of weariness

  bringing meaning to those never in the depths?

  Those who order what they please

  when they choose to have it—

  can they understand the many down under

  who come home to their wives and children at night

  and night after night as yet too brave and unbroken

  to say, “I ache all over”?

  How can a poem deal with production cost

  and leave out definite misery paying

  a permanent price in shattered health and early old age?

  When will the efficiency engineers and the poets

  get together on a program?

  Will that be a cold day? will that be a special hour?

  Will somebody be coocoo then?

  And if so, who?

  And what does the Christian Bible say?

  And the Mohammedan Koran and Confucius and the Shintoisu