He argued to himself about her.

She was a hellcat, he argued.

Crazy, never the same two minutes.

Yet her breasts were hills of passion,

Her tongue made for swift kissing,

Her torso holding sanctuaries

Strange as the lost temples

Of sunken archipelagoes—

She carried sacraments for him

Yet his words for her were hellcat,

Crazy woman.

Bilbea

(From tablet writing, Babylonian excavations of 4th millennium B.C.)

Bilbea, I was in Babylon on Saturday night.

I saw nothing of you anywhere.

I was at the old place and the other girls were there, but no Bilbea.

Have you gone to another house? or city?

Why don’t you write?

I was sorry. I walked home half-sick.

Tell me how it goes.

Send me some kind of a letter.

And take care of yourself.

Lincoln

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is hard as a rock and soft as a drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.

— CARL SANDBURG, from his Lincoln address at a Joint Session of Congress, February 12, 1959

Fire-Logs

Nancy Hanks dreams by the fire;

Dreams, and the logs sputter,

And the yellow tongues climb.

Red lines lick their way in flickers.

Oh, sputter, logs.

Oh, dream, Nancy.

Time now for a beautiful child.

Time now for a tall man to come.

In a Back Alley

Remembrance for a great man is this.

The newsies are pitching pennies.

And on the copper disk is the man’s face.

Dead lover of boys, what do you ask for now?

Knucks

In Abraham Lincoln’s city,

Where they remember his lawyer’s shingle,

The place where they brought him

Wrapped in battle flags,

Wrapped in the smoke of memories

From Tallahassee to the Yukon,

The place now where the shaft of his tomb

Points white against the blue prairie dome,

In Abraham Lincoln’s city . . . I saw knucks

In the window of Mister Fischman’s second-hand store

On Second Street.

I went in and asked, “How much?”

“Thirty cents apiece,” answered Mister Fischman.

And taking a box of new ones off a shelf

He filled anew the box in the showcase

And said incidentally, most casually

And incidentally:

“I sell a carload a month of these.”

I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks,

Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern,

And there came to me a set of thoughts like these:

Mister Fischman is for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff,

And the street car strikers and the strike-breakers,

And the sluggers, gunmen, detectives, policemen,

Judges, utility heads, newspapers, priests, lawyers,

They are all for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff.

I started for the door.

“Maybe you want a lighter pair,”

Came Mister Fischman’s voice.

I opened the door . . . and the voice again:

“You are a funny customer.”

Wrapped in battle flags,

Wrapped in the smoke of memories,