* * *

In Burlington long ago

And later again in Ashtabula

I said to myself:

I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet.

What else was there Shakespeare never told?

There must have been something.

If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia.

There was class to the way she went out of her head.

* * *

Does a famous poet eat watermelon?

Excuse me, ask me something easy.

I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfish on a Monday morning.

And the Japanese, two-legged like us,

The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures.

The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat.

Why do I always think of niggers and buck-and-wing dancing whenever I see watermelon?

Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach baskets piled ten feet high.

Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind along with peaches

I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong-honging across the town.

And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hay-rack load of melons.

* * *

Niggers play banjos because they want to.

The explanation is easy.

It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a policemen’s masquerade ball or a grocers-and-butchers’ picnic with a fat man’s foot race.

It is the same as why boys buy a nickel’s worth of peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel’s worth.

Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved.

The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory.

It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split

away from a school-room geography lesson

in April when the crawfishes come out

and the young frogs are calling

and the pussywillows and the cat-tails

know something about geography themselves.

* * *

I ask you for white blossoms.

I offer you memories and people.

I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching vines.

I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like apple trees.

I make up songs about things to look at:

potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the garden with white spots;

a cavalryman’s yellow silk handkerchief stuck in a flannel pocket over the left side of the shirt, over the ventricles of blood, over the pumps of the heart.

Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.

Let romance stutter to the western stars, “Excuse . . . me . . .”

Cool Tombs

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? … in the dust, in the cool tombs?