The People, Yes Page 19
Some day when the United States of the Earth
gets going and runs smooth and pretty there
will be more of him than we have now.
88
The response of wild birds
to a home on the way,
a stopping place of rest,
this and the wish of a child
to eat the moon
as a golden ginger cookie—
this is in the songs of the people.
The clods of the earth hold place
close to the whir of yellow hummingbird wings
and they divide into those hard of hearing
and those whose ears pick off
a smooth hush with a little wind whimper across it
and then again only the smooth hush.
What are these dialects deep under the bones
whereby the people of ages and races far apart
reach out and say the same clay is in all,
bringing out men whose eyes
search the earth and see no aliens anywhere,
pronouncing across the barriers the peculiar word:
“Brother”?
Washing his shin in a jungle near Omaha,
warming his java under a CB.& Q. bridge,
a hobo mumbled to himself a mumbling poem
and said it was an outline of history
and you could take it or leave it,
you could rìde the rods or hunt an empty
and he would mumble:
“A hammering, a neverending hammering goes on.
Suns and moons by platoons batter down
the shovels and the clamps
of other suns and moons.
“By platoons always by platoons under a hammering,
the cries of the tongs go kling klong
to the bong bong of the hammers.”
The bulls took him in.
The bulls gathered him.
In the lockup he thought it over.
In the cooler he was not so hot,
They said, and further they said,
He was nuts, he was dopey from white mule.
Yet he kept on with his mumbling
of the shovels and the clamps,
of the tongs going kling klong
and the bong bong of the hammers,
of history and its awful anvils.
“Listen,” he cried,
“Kling klong go the mighty hammers,
kling klong on a mighty anvil,
steel on steel they clash and weld,
how long can you last? how long?
goes the clamor of the hammer and the anvil,
how long? goes the steel kling klong:
the gunmetal blue gives it and takes it:
in the fire and the pounding:
the hard old answer goes:
let the works go on:
I will last a long time: yet a long time.”
A fly-by-night house, a shanty,
a ramshackle hut of tarpaper, tin cans,
body by fisher, frames from flivvers,
a shelter from rain and wind,
the home of a homeseeker having an alibi,
why did two hungers move across his face?
One: when do we eat?
The other: What is worth looking at?
what is worth listening to?
why do we live?
when is a homeseeker
just one more trespasser?
and what is worth dying for?
89
Marshall Field the First was spick and span while alive
and wishing to be well kept and properly groomed
in the long afterward
he stipulated in a clause of his will
a fund of $25,000 be set aside and its income be devoted
to the upkeep of his tomb.
The country editor of Stoughton, Wisconsin,
was not so careful, less spick and span.
He left orders to the typesetters and they obeyed him.
His obituary read: “Charlie Cross is dead.”
And that was all.
John Eastman died leaving the Chicago Journal to four men,
to four old friends who knew how to get out the paper.
And to make sure the obsequies would be correct and decent he instructed in his last will and testament:
“Let no words of praise be spoken at my funeral.”
What about that Chinese poet
traveling on a cart
with a jug of wine,
a shovel and a grave-digger?
Each morning as they started
he told the grave-digger:
“Bury me when I am dead—
anywhere, anytime.”
He was afraid of a fancy funeral.
What did he have?
He would be covered down like any coolie
“anywhere, anytime,” no music, no flowers.
What about that radio operator in the North Atlantic
on a stormlashed sinking Scandinavian ship
laughing the wireless message:
“God pity the poor sailors on a night like this”
adding word they were heading for Davy Jones’ locker
and adding further:
“This is no night to be out without an umbrella!”
What about him?
And what did he have?
He went to a sea-tomb laughing an epitaph:
“This is no night to be out without an umbrella.”
Who was that professor at the University of Wisconsin working out a butter-fat milk tester
Good for a million dollars if he wanted a patent with sales and royalties
And he whistled softly and in dulcet tone: What in God’s name do I want with a million dollars?
Whistling as though instead of his owning the million it would own him.
Who was that South Dakota Norwegian who
went to Siberia and brought back
Wheat grains pushing the North American wheat
area hundreds of miles northward?
He could have had a million dollars and took
instead a million thanks.
Why did the two high wizards of applied
electrodynamics say
All they wanted was board and clothes and time
to think things over?
Why did they go along so careless about dollars,
so forgetful about millions,
Letting others organize and gather the shekels
and progress from boom to crash to boom to crash?
Why is the Schenectady hunchback dwarf one
of the saints in shirtsleeves?
And why did the deaf mechanic in Orange, New
Jersey, forget to eat unless his wife called him,
And why did he die saying: What is electricity?
we don’t know. What is heat? we don’t know.
We are beginners. “Look at the moon—it
winks at the ignorance of the world.”
What of the Wright boys in Dayton? Just around the corner they had a shop and did a bicycle business—and they wanted to fly for the sake of flying.
They were Man the Seeker, Man on a Quest. Money was their last thought, their final absent-minded idea.
They threw out a lot of old mistaken measurements and figured new ones that stood up when they took off and held the air and steered a course. They proved “the faster you go the less power you need.”
One of them died and was laid away under blossoms dropped from zooming planes. The other lived on to meditate: what is attraction? when will we learn why things go when they go? what and where is the power?
Why is raggedy Johnny Appleseed half-man half-myth? From old cider mills he filled his sacks with apple-seeds and out of his plantings came orchards in Ohio and Indiana. “God ordained me a sower to sow that others might reap.” Why will they remember the earthly shadow of Johnny with bronze figures tomorrow in Ohio and Indiana?
&nb
sp; Was it true that Van Gogh cut off
one of his ears
and gave it to a daughter
of the streets,
to one who had pleasured him?
And if he did what did he mean by it?
And who could guess what Van Gogh
had in mind if anything in particular?
In and out by thousands they went
to see the Van Gogh exhibit
of paintings touring America,
in and out by thousands
finding the color and line
of a plain strange personality,
something dear and rich
out of the umber of the earth.
Somewhere in what he flung from his brush
was a missing ear
and why it might be missed
and a blunt gesture,
“What of it?”
Why did the St Louis Mirror editor name as his favorite Shakespeare line: “I myself am but indifferent honest”? and how did he mean it when in an owl-car dawn, ending a long night of talk, he blurted to a poet, “God damn it, I tell you there are no bad people”?
Who was the St. Louis mathematician who figured it cost an average of $37,000 to kill each soldier killed in the World War?
He figured too on a way of offering, in case of war, $1,000, one grand, to every deserting soldier.
Each army, the idea ran, would buy off the other before the war could get started.
Who was that Pittsburgh Scotchman terrorized by having a quarter billion dollars?
Why did he give it away before he died as though he could never take it away with him?
Who was the Chicago Jew who threw millions of dollars into Negro schools of the South?
Why did he once tell another Jew, “I’m ashamed to have so much money”?
“There are no pockets in the shroud” may be carried farther:
“The dead hold in their clenched hands only that which they have given away.”
Who was that Roman: “I am a man and nothing on legs and human is a stranger to me”?
He could have met the first Negro who sang: “When you see me laughing I’m laughing to keep from crying.”
Did he give them a high and roaring laughter when he had his throne moved out into the sea,
When he sat in his sea-set throne and commanded the tide: “Go back! go back! it is I, King Knute who tell you so and I am putting you to this test because a circle of my advisers have told me over and again that I am beyond other plain people, I am made of no common day and what I say goes and even the ocean will obey me and do what I say and therefore I give you the order to Go back! go back! and don’t dare bring your stink of sea wrack and salt water even to the footstool of this royal throne of mine”?
Did he give them a high and roaring laughter as the ride slowly and inexorably rose over his footstool, to his knees, to his navel, to his neck,
When he rose, plunged and swam ashore and told them to let the throne be washed out to join the flotsam and jetsam of the immemorial sea?
Who was the young Nicodemus in Chicago so early in the twentieth century falling heir to a million dollars and writing a pamphlet of public inquiry tided The Confessions of a Drone and having one luminous and quivering question to ask:
Why was this money wished on me merely because I was born where I couldn’t help being born so that I don’t have to work while a lot of people work for me and I can follow the races, yacht, play horse polo, chase if I so choose any little international chippie that takes my eye, eat nightingale tongues, buy sea islands or herds of elephants or trained fleas, or go to Zanzibar, to Timbuctoo, to the mountains of the moon, and never work an hour or a day and when I come back I find a lot of people working for me because I was born where I couldn’t help being born?
90
The big fish eat the little fish,
the little fish eat shrimps
and the shrimps eat mud.
You don’t know enough to come in when it rains.
You don’t know beans when the bag is open.
You don’t know enough to pound sand in a rat hole.
All I know is what I hear.
All I know is what I read in the papers.
All I know you can put in a thimble.
All I know I keep forgetting.
We have to eat, don’t we?
You can’t eat promises, can you?
You can’t eat the Constitution, can you?
I can eat crow but I don’t hanker after it.
Don’t quarrel with your bread and butter.
Some curse the hand that feeds them.
Many kiss the hands they wish to see cut off.
You can’t rob a naked man of his clothes.
He that makes himself an ass, men will ride him,
Stand like a good mule and you’re soon harnessed.
Be not rash with thy mouth.
Praise no man before his death,
When pups bark old dogs go along doing whatever
it was they were doing.
He who blackens others does not whiten himself.
The camel has his plans, the camel driver his plans.
The horse thinks one thing, he who saddles him another.
Ask me no questions and I tell you no lies.
The best witness is a written paper.
Liars should have good memories.
Some liars get monotonous.
Hearsay is half lies.
To say nothing is to say yes.
Hold your tongue one second and
a bundle of trouble is held off.
Be careful what you say or
you go out of the door
and meet yourself coming in.
Hunger and cold deliver a man to his enemy.
Hunger says to hell with the law.
The empty belly instructs the tongue.
Want changes men into wild animals.
Unless you say eat the hungry belly can’t
hear you.
91
Who were those editors picking the most
detestable word in the English language
and deciding the one word just a little
worse than any other you can think of
is “Exclusive”?
The doorbells were many and the approaches screened and the corners hushed in the care of frozen-faced butlers and footmen in livery, London trained, chauffeurs, cooks, maids, twenty-two when counted, for personal service in the Lake Shore Drive apartments overlooking one blue of water meeting another blue of skyline.
And one young man yawned over his real estate and securities, his Chicago and Manhattan skyscrapers, his silk mills in France, his woolen mills in Scotland, his cotton mills north and south in the States, yawned over the caretakers and trustees sober and dependable in custody of what had grown since he was a baby to whom accrued from a dying father an estate beyond one hundred millions, one blue of water meeting another blue of skyline then as now. Across the dust and roar of Halsted Street he rode one afternoon into the seething jungles and slums of the West Side, to yawn and smile, “This is No-man’s land to me,” never to go back, to sense it as a dull and alien rabble, a polyglot of panhandlers mooching pig-sdckers, structural ironworkers after a day with rivets and bolts lifting schooners of beer to laugh, “Here every man is as good as the next one and for the matter of that a little better.”