In a Yiddish eating place on Rivington Street . . .
faces . . . coffee spots . . . children kicking at
the night stars with bare toes from bare buttocks.
They know it is September on Rivington when the red
tomaytoes cram the pushcarts,
Here the children snozzle at milk bottles, children who
have never seen a cow.
Here the stranger wonders how so many people remember
where they keep home fires.
Bend low again, night of summer stars.
So near you are, sky of summer stars,
So near, a long arm man can pick off stars,
Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,
So near you are, summer stars,
So near, strumming, strumming,
So lazy and hum-strumming.
Pea pods cling to stems.
Neponset, the village,
Clings to the Burlington railway main line.
Terrible midnight limiteds roar through
Hauling sleepers to the Rockies and Sierras.
The earth is slightly shaken
And Neponset trembles slightly in its sleep.
Policeman in front of a bank 3 A.M. . . . lonely.
Policeman State and Madison . . . high noon . . .
mobs . . . cars . . . parcels . . . lonely.
Woman in suburbs . . . keeping night watch on a
sleeping typhoid patient . . . only a clock to talk
to ... lonesome.
Woman selling gloves ... bargain day department
store . . . furious crazy-work of many hands
slipping in and out of gloves . . . lonesome.
Listen a while, the moon is a lovely woman, a lonely
woman, lost in a silver dress, lost in a circus
rider's silver dress.
Listen a while, the lake by night is a lonely woman, a
lovely woman, circled with birches and pines mixing
their green and white among stars shattered
in spray clear nights.
I know the moon and the lake have twisted the roots
under my heart the same as a lonely woman, a
lovely woman, in a silver dress, in a circus rider's
silver dress.
The sheets of night mist travel a long valley.
I know why you came at sundown in a scarf mist.
What was it we touched asking nothing and asking all ?
How many times can death come and pay back what we saw?
In the oath of the sod, the lips that swore,
In the oath of night mist, nothing and all,
A riddle is here no man tells, no woman.
White Moon comes in on a baby face.
The shafts across her bed are flimmering.
Out on the land White Moon shines,
Shines and glimmers against gnarled shadows,
All silver to slow twisted shadows
Falling across the long road that runs from the house.
Keep a little of your beauty
And some of your flimmering silver
For her by the window to-night
Where you come in, White Moon.
Jimmy Wimbledon listened a first week in June.
Ditches along prairie roads of Northern Illinois
Filled the arch of night with young bullfrog songs.
Infinite mathematical metronomic croaks rose and spoke.
Rose and sang, rose in a choir of puzzles.
They made his head ache with riddles of music.
They rested his head with beaten cadence.
Jimmy Wimbledon listened.
Chatter of birds two by two raises a night song joining
a litany of running water — sheer waters showing the
russet of old stones remembering many rains.
And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the
running water, and sleep from much music; joined
songs of day-end, feathery throats and stony waters,
in a choir chanting new psalms.
It is too much for the long willows when low laughter
of a red moon comes down ; and the willows drowse
and sleep on the shoulders of the running water.
For a woman's face remembered as a spot of quick light
on the flat land of dark night,
For this memory of one mouth and a forehead they go
on in the gray rain and the mud, they go on among
the boots and guns.
The horizon ahead is a thousand fang flashes, it is a row
of teeth that bite on the flanks of night, the horizon
sings of a new kill and a big kill.
The horizon behind is a wall of dark etched with a
memory, fixed with a woman's face — they fight on
and on, boots in the mud and heads in the gray
rain — for the women they hate and the women they
love — for the women they left behind, they fight on.
Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps.
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes.
Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
farms of Saugatuck.
Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a
flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill.
Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping
in curves are loops of light from prow and stern
to the tall smokestacks.
Over the hoarse crunch of waves at my pier comes a
hoarse answer in the rhythmic oompa of the brasses
playing a Polish folk-song for the home-comers.