The milk drops on your chin, Helga,
Must not interfere with the cranberry red of your cheeks
Nor the sky winter blue of your eyes.
Let your mammy keep hands off the chin.
This is a high holy spatter of white on the reds and blues.
Before the bottle was taken away,
Before you so proudly began today
Drinking your milk from the rim of a cup
They did not splash this high holy white on your chin.
There are dreams in your eyes, Helga.
Tall reaches of wind sweep the clear blue.
The winter is young yet, so young.
Only a little cupful of winter has touched your lips.
Drink on ... milk with your lips . . . dreams with your eyes.
Do you know how the dream looms? how if summer
misses one of us the two of us miss summer —
Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long
breath for the change to low contralto singing
mornings when the green corn leaves first break
through the black loam —
And another long breath for the silver soprano melody
of the moon songs in the light nights when the
earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains
lighter than a goose down —
So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the
laughter of slats of silver under a hill hickory.
In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind
motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imitations
of slow sea water on the shingle silver
in the wind —
Count these reminiscences like money.
The Greeks had their picnics under another name.
The Romans wore glad rags and told their neighbors,
"What of it?"
The Carlovingians hauling logs on carts, they too
Stuck their noses in the air and stuck their thumbs to
their noses
And tasted life as a symphonic dream of fresh eggs
broken over a frying pan left by an uncle who
killed men with spears and short swords.
Count these reminiscences like money.
Drift, and drift on, white ships.
Sailing the free sky blue, sailing and changing and
sailing,
Oh, I remember in the blood of my dreams how they
sang before me.
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.
If the dreams shake our bones, what can we say or do?
Since early morning we waited.
Since early, early morning, child.
There must be dreams on the way now.
There must be a song for our bones.
The dust gets deeper and darker.
Do the doors and lintels shudder?
How long must we listen here?
How long before we go?
Cover me over
In dusk and dust and dreams.
Cover me over
And leave me alone.
Cover me over.
You tireless, great.
Hear me and cover me,
Bringers of dusk and dust and dreams.
On the lips of the child Janet float changing dreams.
It is a thin spiral of blue smoke,
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.
Nancy Hanks dreams by the fire ;
Dreams, and the logs sputter,
And the yellow tongues climb.
Red lines lick their way in flickers.
Oh, sputter, logs.
Oh, dream, Nancy.
Time now for a beautiful child.
Time now for a tall man to come.
Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana
town and dreamed of romance and big things off
somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down
where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and
when the newspapers came in on the morning mail
she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all
the trains ran.
She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office
chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the
band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration
Day
And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the
bars and was going to kill herself
When the thought came to her that if she was going to
You will come one day in a waver of love,
Tender as dew, impetuous as rain.
The tan of the sun will be on your skin,
The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,
You will pose with a hill-flower grace.
You will come, with your slim, expressive arms,
A poise of the head no sculptor has caught
And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck,
Your face in a pass-and-repass of moods
As many as skies in delicate change
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.
Yet,
You may not come, O girl of a dream.
We may but pass as the world goes by
And take from a look of eyes into eyes,
A film of hope and a memoried day.
Between two hills
The old town stands.
The houses loom
And the roofs and trees
And the dusk and the dark,
The damp and the dew
Are there.
The prayers are said
And the people rest
For sleep is there
And the touch of dreams
Is over all.
Stuff of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,
And round the creep of the wave line,
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.
All my lean life
I garnered nothing but a dream or two,
These others gathered harvests
And grew fat with grain.
But no man lives by bread,
And bread alone.
So, forgetful of their scorn,
When starved, they cried for life,
I gave them my last dreams,
I bared for them my heart,
That they might eat!