Time poems
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To The Dead
© Frank Bidart
What I hope (when I hope) is that we'll
see each other again,--. . . and again reach the VEINin which we loved each other . .
It existed. It existed.There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,--. . . for, like the detectives (the Ritz Brothers)
in The Gorilla,once we'd been battered by the gorillawe searched the walls, the intricately carved
Guilty Of Dust
© Frank Bidart
up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of timethe voice in my head saidLOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVEWHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE *then I saw the parade of my lovesthose PERFORMERS comics actors singersforgetful of my very self so often I
desired to die to myself to live in themthen my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained
California Plush
© Frank Bidart
is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing
Herbert White
© Frank Bidart
and then I did it to her a couple of times,--
but it was funny,--afterwards,
it was as if somebody else did it ...
Adolescence
© Frank Bidart
He stared up into my eyes with a look
I can almost see now.He had that look in his eyes
that bore right into mine.I could sense that he knew I was
envious of what he was doing; and knew that I'dalways wish I had known at the time
Dedication
© Wole Soyinka
Earth will not share the rafter's envy; dung floors
Break, not the gecko's slight skin, but its fall
Taste this soil for death and plumb her deep for life
Weeds
© Carl Sandburg
FROM the time of the early radishes
To the time of the standing corn
Sleepy Henry Hackerman hoes.
Three Violins
© Carl Sandburg
THREE violins are trying their hearts.
The piece is MacDowells Wild Rose.
And the time of the wild rose
And the leaves of the wild rose
They Ask Each Other Where They Came From
© Carl Sandburg
AM I the river your white birds fly over?
Are you the green valley my silver channels roam?
The two of us a bowl of blue sky day time and a bowl of red stars night time?
Who picked you
out of the first great whirl of nothings
and threw you here?
The Sins of Kalamazoo
© Carl Sandburg
THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.
The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.
The Mayor of Gary
© Carl Sandburg
I ASKED the Mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.
And the Mayor of Gary answered more workmen steal time on the job in Gary than any other place in the United States.
Go into the plants and you will see men sitting around doing nothingmachinery does everything, said the Mayor of Gary when I asked him about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.
And he wore cool cream pants, the Mayor of Gary, and white shoes, and a barber had fixed him up with a shampoo and a shave and he was easy and imperturbable though the government weather bureau thermometer said 96 and children were soaking their heads at bubbling fountains on the street corners.
The Liars
© Carl Sandburg
(March, 1919)A LIAR goes in fine clothes.
A liar goes in rags.
A liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.
A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.
The Great Hunt
© Carl Sandburg
I cannot tell you now;
When the wind's drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind's a whisper at last--
Maybe I'll tell you then--
some other time.
The Four Brothers
© Carl Sandburg
MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.
Smoke and Steel
© Carl Sandburg
SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,
Sleepyheads
© Carl Sandburg
SLEEP is a maker of makers. Birds sleep. Feet cling to a perch. Look at the balance. Let the legs loosen, the backbone untwist, the head go heavy over, the whole works tumbles a done bird off the perch.
Fox cubs sleep. The pointed head curls round into hind legs and tail. It is a ball of red hair. It is a muff waiting. A wind might whisk it in the air across pastures and rivers, a cocoon, a pod of seeds. The snooze of the black nose is in a circle of red hair.
Real Estate News
© Carl Sandburg
ARMOUR AVENUE was the name of this street and door signs on empty houses read The Silver Dollar, Swede Annie and the Christian names of madams such as Myrtle and Jenny.
Scrap iron, rags and bottles fill the front rooms hither and yon and signs in Yiddish say Abe Kaplan & Co. are running junk shops in whore houses of former times.
The segregated district, the Tenderloin, is here no more; the red-lights are gone; the ring of shovels handling scrap iron replaces the banging of pianos and the bawling songs of pimps.Chicago, 1915.
Put Off the Wedding Five Times and Nobody Comes to It
© Carl Sandburg
(Handbook for Quarreling Lovers)I THOUGHT of offering you apothegms.
I might have said, Dogs bark and the wind carries it away.
I might have said, He who would make a door of gold must knock a nail in every day.
So easy, so easy it would have been to inaugurate a high impetuous moment for you to look on before the final farewells were spoken.
Personality
© Carl Sandburg
Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification BureauYOU have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only
one thumb.
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and
Old Timers
© Carl Sandburg
I AM an ancient reluctant conscript.
On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans.
