How much do you love me, a million bushels?
Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.
And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel?
Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel.
And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’ s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
They made a myth of you, professor,
you of the gentle voice,
the books, the specs,
the furitive rabbit manners
in the mortar-board cap
and the medieval gown.
They didn’ t think it, eh professor?
On account of you’ re so absent-minded,
you bumping into the tree and saying,
“Excuse me, I thought you were a tree,”
passing on again blank and absent-minded.
The abracadabra boys — have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems?
Have they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh.
They know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay.
1
I SPOT the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.
The field blank in snow. But I mean this page.
Now print mars the surface to make surface
Seen. Sheen only error brings. Perfect rage
So the sun rises. Rage is your slow practice
That makes of every day another day
In whose gathering promise the shy sparrows
Shiver instead of sing. I want to go away.
See these footsteps? These black shapes in the snow?
If there is a word for them, it’ s no word
I know. Pursuit?, no. Proof?, no. Don’ t call it fear.
Could I cross this white sheet if I were coward,
Lynette, the stars are kerned so far apart —
Through a herniated zodiac I almost see your waled skylanes, your shocked Capricorn and Cancer.
In the hundred and two years since you were born, and the sixteen since your heart failed, and the nearly sixty since you gave up poetry, it seems we can’ t navigate by the same star chart.
I’ d like to think we were fated to work the same coracle: you steering with one hand, grasping your corner of the seine while I grasp mine; together sweeping the weirs.
They have no sense of what they’ re looking at,
Unless the object moves.
(Or so he’ s read; who knows if that’ s the case?)
A painted bird’ s an empty analogue
To the oblivious cat.
And it is not his still familiar face
So much as that distinctive gait which proves
The master to his dog,
Who frolics for him like an acrobat.
Light was on its way
from nothing
to nowhere.
Light was all business
Light was full speed
when it got interrupted.
Interrupted by what?
When it got tangled up
and broke
into opposite
broke into brand new things.
What kinds of things?
Drinking Cup
“Thinking of you!
Convenience Valet”
