* * *

Towns on the Soo Line,

Towns on the Big Muddy,

Laugh at each other for cubs

And tease as children.

Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing up.

Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo, sisters throwing slang, growing up.

* * *

Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke—out of a smoke pillar, a blue promise—out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples—

Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round the world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.

Out of log houses and stumps—canoes stripped from tree-sides—flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timber claims—in the years when the red and the white men met—the houses and streets rose.

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter’s chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steamboat.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.

I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.

* * *

What brothers these in the dark?

What eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon?

These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties

When the coal boats plow by on the river—

The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators—

The flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills

And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off

Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel:

what brothers these

in the dark

of a thousand years?

* * *

A headlight searches a snowstorm.

A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.

In the morning hours, in the dawn,

The sun puts out the stars of the sky

And the headlight of the Limited train.

The fireman waves his hand to a country school teacher on a bobsled.

A boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bobsled, in his lunch box a pork chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.

The horses fathom a snow to their knees.

Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills.

The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats.

* * *

Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain,

O farmerman.

Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs

Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat.

Kill your hogs with a knife slit under the ear.

Hack them with cleavers.

Hang them with hooks in the hind legs.

* * *

A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning.

Sprinkles of dew on the crimson-purple balls.

The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of dapple-gray horses.