The People, Yes Read online

  and in the years yet to come

  the young shall ask what was the idea

  for which you gave me death

  and what was I saying

  that I must die for what I said?”

  28

  In the days of the cockade and the brass pistol

  Fear of the people brought the debtors’ jail.

  The creditor said, “Pay me or go to prison,”

  And men lacking property lacked ballots and citizenship.

  Into the Constitution of the United States they wrote a fear

  In the form of “checks and balances,” “proper restraints”

  On the people so whimsical and changeable,

  So variable in mood and weather.

  Lights of tallow candles fell on lawbooks by night.

  The woolspun clothes came from sheep near by.

  Men of “solid substance” wore velvet knickerbockers

  And shared snuff with one another in greetings.

  One of these made a name for himself with saying

  You could never tell what was coming next from the people:

  “Your people, sir, your people is a great beast,”

  Speaking for those afraid of the people,

  Afraid of sudden massed action of the people,

  The people being irresponsible with torch, gun and rope,

  The people being a child with fire and loose hardware,

  The people listening to leather-lunged stump orators

  Crying the rich get richer, the poor poorer, and why?

  The people undependable as prairie rivers in floodtime,

  The people uncertain as lights on the face of the sea

  Wherefore high and first of all he would write

  God, the Constitution, Property Rights, the Army and the Police,

  After these the rights of the people.

  The meaning was:

  The people having nothing to lose take chances.

  The people having nothing to take care of are careless.

  The people lacking property are slack about property.

  Having no taxes to pay how can they consider taxes?

  “And the poor have they not themselves to blame for their

  poverty?”

  Those who have must take care of those who have not

  Even though in the providence of events some of

  Those who now have not once had and what they had then

  Was taken away from them by those who now have.

  Naughts are naughts into riffraff.

  Nothing plus nothing equals nothing.

  Scum is scum and dregs are dregs.

  “This flotsam and jetsam.”

  There is the House of Have and the House of Have-Not.

  God named the Haves as caretakers of the Have-Nots.

  This shepherding is a divine decree laid on the betters.

  “And surely you know when you are among your betters?”

  This and a lot else was in the meaning:

  “Your people, sir, is a great beast.”

  The testament came with deliberation

  Cold as ice, warm as blood,

  Hard as a steel hand steel-gloved,

  A steel foot steel-shod

  For contact with another testament:

  “All men are born free and equal.”

  The cow content to give milk and calves,

  The plug work-horse plowing from dawn till dark,

  The mule lashed with a blacksnake when balking—

  Fed and sheltered—or maybe not—all depending—

  A pet monkey leaping for nuts thrown to it,

  A parrot ready to prattle your words

  And repeat after you your favorite oaths—

  Or a nameless monster to be guarded and tended

  Against temper and flashes of retaliation—

  These were the background symbols:

  “Your people, sir, is a great beast.”

  29

  The people, yes—

  Born with bones and heart fused in deep and violent secrets

  Mixed from a bowl of sky blue dreams and sea slime facts—

  A seething of saints and sinners, toilers, loafers, oxen, apes

  In a womb of superstition, faith, genius, crime, sacrifice—

  The one and only source of armies, navies, work-gangs,

  The living flowing breath of the history of nations,

  Of the little Family of Man hugging the little ball of Earth,

  And a long hall of mirrors, straight, convex and concave,

  Moving and endless with scrolls of the living,

  Shimmering with phantoms flung from the past,

  Shot over with lights of babies to come, not yet here.

  The honorable orators, the gazettes of thunder,

  The tycoons, big shots and dictators,

  Flicker in the mirrors a few moments

  And fade through the glass of death

  For discussion in an autocracy of worms

  While the rootholds of the earth nourish the majestic people

  And the new generations with names never heard of

  Plow deep in broken drums and shoot craps for old crowns,

  Shouting unimagined shibboleths and slogans,

  Tracing their heels in moth-eaten insignia of bawdy leaders—

  Piling revolt on revolt across night valleys,

  Letting loose insurrections, uprisings, strikes,

  Marches, mass-meetings, banners, declared resolves,

  Plodding in a somnambulism of fog and rain

  Till a given moment exploded by long-prepared events—

  Then again the overthrow of an old order

  And the trials of another new authority

  And death and taxes, crops and droughts,

  Chinch bugs, grasshoppers, corn borers, boll weevils,

  Top soil farms blown away in a dust and wind,

  Inexorable rains carrying off rich loam,

  And mortgages, house rent, groceries,

  Jobs, pay cuts, layoffs, relief

  And passion and poverty and crime

  And the paradoxes not yet resolved

  Of the shrewd and elusive proverbs,

  The have-you-heard yarns,

  The listen-to-this anecdote

  Made by the people out of the roots of the earth,

  Out of dirt, barns, workshops, time-tables,

  Out of lumberjack payday jamborees,

  Out of joybells and headaches the day after,

  Out of births, weddings, accidents,

  Out of wars, laws, promises, betrayals,

  Out of mists of the lost and anonymous,

  Out of plain living, early rising and spare belongings:

  30

  We’ll see what we’ll see.

  Time is a great teacher.

  Today me and tomorrow maybe you.

  This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

  What is bitter to stand against today may be sweet to remember tomorrow.

  Fine words butter no parsnips. Moonlight dries no mittens.

  Whether the stone bumps the jug or the jug bumps the stone it is bad for the jug.

  One hand washes the other and both wash the face.

  Better leave the child’s nose dirty than wring it off.

  We all belong to the same big family and have the same smell.

  Handling honey, tar or dung some of it sticks to the fingers.

  The liar comes to believe his own lies.

  He who bums himself must sit on the blisters.

  God alone understands fools.

  The dumb mother understands the dumb child.

  To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then to go to hell after all would be too damned hard.

  You can fool all the people part of the time and part of the people all the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

  It takes all kinds of people to make a world.

  What is bre
d in the bone will tell.

  Between the inbreds and the cross-breeds the argument

  goes on.

  You can breed them up as easy as you can breed

  them down.

  “I don’t know who my ancestors were,” said a

  mongrel, “but we’ve been descending for a

  long time.”

  “My ancestors,” said the Cherokee-blooded Oklahoman,

  “didn’t come over in the Mayflower

  but we was there to meet the boat.”

  “Why,” said the Denver Irish policeman as he

  arrested a Pawnee Indian I.W.W. soapboxer,

  “why don’t you go back where you came from?”

  An expert is only a damned fool a long ways from home.

  You’re either a thoroughbred, a scrub, or an in-between.

  Speed is born with the foal—sometimes.

  Always some dark horse never heard of before is coming under the wire a winner.

  A thoroughbred always wins against a scrub, though you never know for sure: even thoroughbreds have their off days: new blood tells: the wornout thoroughbreds lose to the fast young scrubs.

  There is a luck of faces and bloods

  Comes to a child and touches it.

  It comes like a bird never seen.

  It goes like a bird never handled.

  There are little mothers hear the bird,

  Feel the flitting of wings never seen,

  And the touch of the givers of luck,

  The bringers of faces and bloods.

  31

  “Your low birth puts you beneath me,”

  said Harmodius, Iphicrates replying,

  “The difference between us is this.

  My family begins with me.

  Yours ends with you.”

  “A long, tall man won’t always make a good fireman,” said the Santa Fe engineer to a couple of other rails deadheading back. “Out of a dozen wants to be firemen you can pick ’em. Take one of these weakly fellers he’ll do his best but he’s all gone time you get nine miles. Take a short, stout feller, low down so he can get at his coal, and he’ll beat one of those tall fellers has to stoop. But if a tall feller’s got long arms he can do wonders. I knowed one engineer used to say he had a fireman he never saw him throw a shovel of coal on the fire—his arms was so long he just reached and laid the coal on!”

  He can turn around on a dime.

  He has an automobile thirst and a wheelbarrow income.

  I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on my way.

  I’ll knock you so high in the air you’ll starve coming down.

  A bonanza is a hole in the ground owned by a champion liar.

  All you get from him you can put in your eye.

  He tried to get a bird in the hand and two in the bush but what

  he got was a horse of another color.

  If the government tried to pay me for what I don’t know there

  wouldn’t be enough money in all the mints to pay me.

  You can’t tell him anything because he thinks he knows more

  now than he gets paid for.

  It’s a slow burg—I spent a couple of weeks there one day.

  He bit off more than he could chew.

  Don’t take a mouthful bigger than your mouth.

  Let’s take it apart to see how it ticks.

  If we had a little ham we could have some ham and eggs if we

  had some eggs.

  He always takes off his hat when he mentions his own name.

  What’s the matter with him? The big I, always the big I.

  “Why didn’t you zigzag your car and miss him?” “He was zigzagging

  himself and outguessed me.”

  “Are you guilty or not guilty?” “What else have you?”

  “Are you guilty or not guilty?” “I stands mute.”

  32

  What the people learn out of lifting and hauling and waiting and losing and laughing

  Goes into a scroll, an almanac, a record folding and unfolding, and the music goes down and around:

  The story goes on and on, happens, forgets to happen, goes out and meets itself coming in, puts on disguises and drops them.

  “Yes yes, go on, go on, I’m listening.” You hear that in one doorway.

  And in the next, “Aw shut up, close your trap, button your tongue, you talk too much.”

  The people, yes, the people,

  To the museum, the aquarium, the planetarium, the zoo, they go by thousands, coming away to talk about mummies, camels, fish and stars,

  The police and constables holding every one of them either a lawbreaker or lawabiding.

  The fingerprint expert swears no two of them ever has finger lines and circlings the same.

  The handwriting expert swears no one of them ever writes his name twice the same way.

  To the grocer and the banker they are customers, depositors, investors.

  The politician counts them as voters, the newspaper editor as readers, the gambler as suckers.

  The priest holds each one an immortal soul in the care of Almighty God.

  bright accidents from the chromosome

  spill from the color bowl of the

  chromosomes some go under in early

  bubbles some learn from desert blossoms

  how to lay up and use thin

  hoardings of night mist

  In an old French town

  the mayor ordered the people

  to hang lanterns in front of their houses

  which the people did

  but the lanterns gave no light

  so the mayor ordered they must

  put candles in the lanterns

  which the people did

  but the candles in the lanterns gave no light

  whereupon the mayor ordered

  they must light the candles in the lanterns

  which the people did

  and thereupon there was light.

  The cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education.

  All she needs for housekeeping is a can opener.

  They’ll fly high if you give them wings.

  Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.

  Everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything

  about it.

  The auk flies backward so as to see where it’s been.

  Handle with care women and glass.

  Women and linen look best by candlelight.

  One hair of a woman draws more than a team of horses.

  Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.

  You can send a boy to college but you can’t make him think.

  The time to sell is when you have a customer.

  Sell the buffalo hide after you have killed the buffalo.

  The more you fill a barrel the more it weighs unless you fill it