On the rim of a skyscraper’s foreheadI looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.Hats: tell me your high hopes.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land … five white dice rolled from a tube.Not so long ago … the sea was large…And to-day the sea has lost nothing … it keeps all.I am a loon about the sea.I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I forget so…
Go to it, O jazzmen.Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happytin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go husha-husha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops,moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like aracing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang!you jazzmen, bang altogether drums,…
There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun-I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates…
Flashes and flashes–voies and voicescalling for ears to put words inFaces at the ends of wires asking for other facesat the ends of other wires:All day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in,Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears.
Shot off his nose and shot out his right eye.And this Chamfort knew how to writeAnd thousands read his books on how to live,But he himself didn’t knowHow to die by force of his own hand—see?They found him a red pool on the carpetCool as an April forenoon,Talking and talking gay maxims and grim epigrams.Well,…
A morning campfire at a mountain lake.On the lips of the child Janet,Wisps of haze on ten miles of corn,Young light blue calls to young light gold of morning.
Grey lights in a woman’sasking eyes,Red ruins in the changingsunset embers:I take you and pile highthe memories.Death will break her clawson some I keep.
In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags,Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby-buggies.Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.The people and wagons come and go, out and in.Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.The policemen whistle, the trolly cars bump:Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.In the false…
Come to me only with playthings now. . .A picture of a singing woman with blue eyesStanding at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling storiesOf days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .No more iron cold and real to handle,Shaped for…
