Honey and Salt Read online

  I took a long sweet time learning to talk

  and now I carry many half-words not yet made,

  hankering hoodoo words taking shape in mud:

  protoplasm, spermatozoa, phantasms, taboos.

  In the pour of a thrush morningsong,

  in the lonesome cry of a loon at moonrise,

  is the rush of more half-words:

  All horns are one horn

  and I am the sheep, the goat,

  the yak, the buffalo, the prongbuck.

  All shells are one shell

  and I am the mussel clam,

  the oyster, the mother-of-pearl.

  I have been a freshwater polyp, a star-fish,

  budding into evermore births of likeness

  following likeness.

  I have spent nights as kin of singing crickets,

  meadow locusts, katydids, only the males singing,

  the females silent and waiting

  I have been the calling frog with a bubble at his

  throat—and the spotted snake who came to spell

  doom and appeasement of hunger.

  I have spoken as a brother to the walking stick

  and the hesitations of his stilts and knee-joints.

  I am the penguin and ostrich

  trying to remember lost wings.

  I am the snake who had many legs

  trying to remember my lost legs.

  I have had a thousand fish faces, sea faces,

  sliding off into land faces, monkey faces—

  I began in a dim green mist

  of floating faces.

  I have worn covers of thick strong hair and smooth fur.

  I have shed rain and sleet with my feathers and down.

  I have carried thick wool wrapping me warm as I slept

  in snow.

  I have had tropic and arctic garments bestowed on me.

  ***

  ***

  Since death is there in the light of the sun, in the song of the wind,

  Since death is there in the marvel of the sun coining up to travel its arc and go down saying, “I am time and you are time,”

  Since death is there in the slow creep of every dawn and in all the steps of shadow moving into evening and dusk of stars,

  Since death is there in almost inaudible chimes of every slow clocktick beginning at the birth hour there must be a tremor of music in the last little gong, the pling of the final announcement from, the Black Void.

  Have I not seen forms

  flowing into faces and voices—

  numbers hoarse and high with the mating cry

  over rolling white sea-horses and forked lightning,

  over the infinite velvet of blue land-fog,

  over sacramental bread and heavy blood roses,

  over mate-brown pigeons flying into burnt wilderness,

  gazing into star-pool waters holding the great serene

  constellations?

  I meditate with the mud eel

  on where we came from.

  Not yet can I give the scream speech

  of a great white albatross—

  frozen foam and sea-drift for her

  high on an iceberg’s shining white hat,

  whirr and sweep of her wings

  in the splinters of an arc of northern lights.

  I am a three-hundred-year-old galapagos turtle,

  sleeping and eating, eating and sleeping,

  blinking and easy, sleepy-eyed and easy,

  while shakespeare writes a flock of plays,

  while john bunyan sits in jail and writes a book,

  while cromwell, napoleon, lincoln, wilson, lenin,

  come and go, stride and vanish

  while bryan, morgan, rockefeller, lafolette, algeld,

  become names spelled and written.

  I sleep, forget, remember, forget again, and ask:

  What of it?

  Don’t bother me, brother.

  Don’t bother a dozing turtle

  born to contemplate and yawn.

  I was a scorpion and a tarantula

  before the first huts of guadalajara,

  before the first aztecs gathered bananas.

  I was a maroon cockatoo and a green parakeet

  before the first incas fashioned bird-cages.

  In western nebraska I was a wild prairie pony

  with a white forelock down my sorrel face

  before ever a caesar or alexander or any czar

  dreamed the smoke-shadow of a dream

  of shattering armies beyond the horizon

  and taking over.

  What is this burden I carry out of yesterday?

  Why am I so wise, so grand, so cunning, so ignorant?

  What have I made that I haven’t broken?

  What have I bred that I haven’t killed?

  Why have I prized my skills as a killer?

  What jargons, what gibberish, must I yet unlearn?

  What are these bygones of dreams, moans, shadows?

  Who are these people I come from who follow the ways

  of long-gone time and long-gone fathers?

  What are these bygones

  sea-brought and land-locked?

  For I am one and all of them:

  they swarm in me with song, cry and murmur;

  they fill my room with scurrying fish,

  with apes and kangaroos, with swine and birds;

  they bring arenas and theaters of action

  wherein they kill, eat, crave, sing, live on,

  or perish before the might of the stronger;

  they stir with bleats and moans;

  they fade with growls and chuckles.

  They dream in me

  and rise dripping on sea horizons

  to shout hosannahs, to cry thanks,

  to vanish leaving no sign nor track

  on the silent lines of green mist.

  The earth rocked me

  in a cradle of winds.

  The fog and the mud

  clung as a wrap and home

  of swaddling cloths.

  And the sea sang bye-lo bye-lo

  and the stars and the rains

  brought changing songs: so-long so-long

  joined to the sea’s old bye-lo bye-lo.

  ***

  ***

  Deep roots moving in lush soil to send a silver-gray beech tree straight toward the sky—

  Shallow roots in barren land sending their stalks of grass and weeds up over to bend in the wind with whisper tones—

  Tangled and winding roots in desert wastes rising into cactus and the joshua tree to bring a hush on the air with spare and murmuring blossoms wrought from dews of night air—

  Am I, are you, kin to these everliving roots? Have you, have I, one time long ago been an oak with a wind song in our leaves?

  Have the bones of your torso spoken low to a sugar maple in october flaming in branch and leaf: “We can not be strangers, I know how you are what you are in root and trunk.”

  ***

  ***

  I have said to the elephant and the flea, “Each of us makes his life in what to him is the Known and for each of us there is a vast Unknown and farther beyond the vaster Unknowable—and the Ignorance we share and share alike is immeasurable.”

  The one-eyed mollusc on the sea-bottom, feathered and luminous, is my equal in what he and I know of star clusters not yet found by the best of star-gazers.

  ***

  ***

  The earth is a forgotten cinder.

  A heaving fireball cooled off.

  Thus the story of the rocks.

  Each river came later than the cooling.

  Next comes the freezing of the globe.

  A heaving iceball will travel alone.

  The rivers will be too cold to move.

  Each flowering valley will be a memory.

  The autobiography of a wild rose will run:

  My leaves pressed between the times


  of a fireball and an iceball.

  ***

  ***

  I have been woven among meshes of long ropes

  and fine filaments: older than the rocks and

  fresh as the dawn of this morning today are

  the everliving roots who begot me,

  who poured me as one more seeker

  one more swimmer in the gold and gray procession

  of phantoms laughing, fighting, singing, moan-

  ing toward the great cool calm of the fixed

  return to the filaments of dust.

  I am more than a traveler out of Nowhere.

  Sea and land, sky and air, begot me Somewhere.

  Where I go from here and now, or if I go at all

  again, the Maker of sea and land, of sky and

  air, can tell.

  ***

  ***

  There is only one horse on the earth

  and his name is All Horses.

  There is only one bird in the air

  and his name is All Wings.

  There is only one fish in the sea

  and his name is All Fins.

  There is only one man in the world

  and his name is All Men.

  There is only one woman in the world

  and her name is All Women.

  There is only one child in the world

  and the child’s name is All Children.

  There is only one Maker in the world

  and His children cover the earth

  and they are named All God’s Children.

  About the Author

  CARL SANDBURG (1878–1967) was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1940 for his biography of Abraham Lincoln and again in 1951 for Complete Poems. Before becoming known as a poet, he worked as a milkman, an ice harvester, a dishwasher, a salesman, a fireman, and a journalist. Among his classics are the Rootabaga Stories, which he wrote for his young daughters at the beginning of his long and distinguished literary career.