Cornhuskers. 1918.
#Americans
I HAVE ransacked the encyclopedi… And slid my fingers among topics a… Looking for you. And the answer comes slow. There seems to be no answer.
I WILL keep you and bring hands… I will run a spear in you for a gr… I will stab you between the ribs o…
I AM singing to you Soft as a man with a dead child sp… Hard as a man in handcuffs, Held where he cannot move: Under the sun
DREAMS in the dusk, Only dreams closing the day And with the day’s close going bac… To the gray things, the dark thing… The far, deep things of dreamland.
You come along. . . tearing your s… Jesus. Where do you get that stuff? What do you know about Jesus? Jesus had a way of talking soft an…
The sea-wash never ends. The sea-wash repeats, repeats. Only old songs? Is that all the s… Only the old strong songs? Is that all?
Child of the Aztec gods, how long must we listen here, how long before we go? The dust is deep on the lintels. The dust is dark on the doors.
I HEARD a woman’s lips Speaking to a companion Say these words: “A woman what hustles Never keeps nothin’
I SAW a mouth jeering. A smile o… A fist hit the mouth: knuckles of… The fist hit the mouth over and ov… And I saw the more the fist pound…
IN a jeweler’s shop I saw a man b… out thin sheets of gold. I heard a… laugh many years ago. Under a peach tree I saw petals s… .. torn strips of a bride’s dress.…
This flower is repeated out of old winds, out of old times. The wind repeats these, it must have these, over and
LET down your braids of hair, lad… Cross your legs and sit before the… And gaze long on lines under your… Life writes; men dance. And you know how men pay women.
She held herself a deep pool for h… And the shadows crying for him He gathered himself in many dark w… And the shadows crying for her They took each other in shadow mee…
I HAVE kept all, not one is thro… The red ones and the blue, the lon… Keep them: I tell my heart: keep… They came once, they came easy, th… Like any sudden, presumptuous, bea…
HOG Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nat… Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders: