Four Poems

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town. Far off Everybody loved her. So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold On a dream she wants. Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went. Nobody knows why she packed her trunk: a few old things And is gone.... Gone with her little chin Thrust ahead of her And her soft hair blowing careless From under a wide hat, Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover. Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick? Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts? Everybody loved Chick Lorimer. Nobody knows where she’s gone.

I dreamed one man stood against a thousand, One man damned as a wrongheaded fool. One year and another he walked the streets, And a thousand shrugs and hoots Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed. He died alone And only the undertaker came to his funeral. Flowers grow over his grave anod in the wind, And over the graves of the thousand, too, The flowers grow anod in the wind. Flowers and the wind, Flowers anod over the graves of the dead, Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white, Masses of purple sagging ... I love you and your great way of forgetting.

They offer you many things, I a few. Moonlight on the play of fountains at night With water sparkling a drowsy monotone, Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk And a cross-play of loves and adulteries And a fear of death and a remembering of regrets: All this they offer you. I come with: salt and bread a terrible job of work and tireless war; Come and have now: hunger danger and hate.

The dago shovelman sits by the railroad track Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna. A train whirls by and men and women at tables Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils, Eat steaks running with brown gravy, Strawberries and cream, eclairs and coffee. The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna, Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day’s work, Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.