After he steps out the door closes; the door, the door knob, the table, the white sheet, there is nothing at all; the owners are shadows; the owners are gone; not even a knocking; not even a knock, knock, knock . . . louder, lower, in the time of the human heartbeat.

The lights are snapped on. Charlie, “the marvelous urchin, the little genius of the screen” (chatter it with a running monkey’s laughter cry) Charlie is laughing a laugh the whole world knows.

The room is full of cream yellow lights. Charlie is laughing . . . louder . . . lower . . .

And again the heartbeats laugh . . . the human heartbeats laugh . . .

To the Ghost of John Milton

If I should pamphleteer twenty years against royalists,

With rewards offered for my capture dead or alive,

And jails and scaffolds always near,

And then my wife should die and three ignorant daughters

Should talk about their father as a joke, and steal the

Earnings of books, and the poorhouse always reaching for

me,

If I then lost my eyes and the world was all dark and I

Sat with only memories and talk—

I would write “Paradise Lost,” I would marry a second wife

And on her dying I would marry a third pair of eyes to

Serve my blind eyes, I would write “Paradise Regained,” I

Would write wild, foggy, smoky, wordy books—

I would sit by the fire and dream of hell and heaven,

Idiots and kings, women my eyes could never look on again,

And God Himself and the rebels God threw into hell.

Mysterious Biography

Christofo Colombo was a hungry man,

hunted himself half way round the world;

he began poor, panhandled, ended in jail,

Christofo so hungry, Christofo so poor,

Christofo in the chilly, steel bracelets,

honorable distinguished Christofo Colombo.

Mr. Longfellow and His Boy

(An old-fashioned recitation to be read aloud)

Mr. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,

the Harvard Professor,

the poet whose pieces you see in all the schoolbooks,

“Tell me not in mournful numbers

life is but an empty dream . . .”

Mr. Longfellow sits in his Boston library writing,

Mr. Longfellow looks across the room

and sees his nineteen-year-old boy

propped up in a chair at a window,

home from the war,

a rifle ball through right and left shoulders.

In his diary the father writes about his boy:

“He has a wound through him a foot long.

He pretends it does not hurt him.”

And the father if he had known

would have told the boy propped up in a chair

how one of the poems written in that room

made President Lincoln cry.

And both the father and the boy

would have smiled to each other and felt good

about why the President had tears over that poem.

Noah Brooks, the California newspaperman,

could have told the Longfellows how one day

Brooks heard the President saying two lines:

“Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!