shall sit on its haunches and look. It
shall forget and later remember.
The sun has warmed me. I call my
hound back to me over the plains. I
caress it. My voice is raised in a song.
My house shakes with my cries. I spread
banners afar, over the sky.
My hound mind has brought me the
love of the gold. It has brought me the
love of the lust. It has made me a proud
man who walks on the bodies of slaves.
It has taught me the lust of the purple
robe, the lust of the lovely bodies of
women.
Who knew as I walked among men
how I lusted, what gold coins dripped
from my fingers, how my blood was hot
with the lust of war, of killing, of glory.
Who knew that I was a king walking
the streets of a factory town, begging for
bread, sleeping in straw.
With my hound asleep in its kennel I
walked with a Cæsar. I played at battles
with a Corsican corporal.
I lived in a factory town. I lived in the
palace and walked in the park of a king.
Who knew that I made beautiful American cities.
Who knew I planted purple
and gold flowers on the ash heaps of cities.
Who knew how my soul knelt to the
beauty of lives. Who knew how I knelt
before lives, how like a white Christ I
hungered and loved my way into lives.
My hound mind has been into the
mountains with Jesus. It has been with
the gentle Confucius. It has been with
all gentle men.
It has been with the mighty and proud.
It has been with those who slew in the
darkness and threw the knife into a bush.
It has been with those who stole money
at night, with a boy who crept into a barn
lusting alone, with a woman who opened
softly the door to look for her lover.
I am a man who sits in the sun before the
door of his house. My body grows old.
The hinges creak on the door of the kennel.
My hound mind runs out over the
plains. It runs backward and forward.
It has run back into lives. It runs on into
new lives.
King David could not be warmed by
the virgins that crept with him into a bed
but my sweetheart the sun has brought
warmth into my body.
I shall call my hound back to me over
the plains. I shall caress it. My voice
shall be raised in a song. My house shall
shake with my cries. I shall spread banners afar over the skies.
HALF GODS
THE LITTLE half-gods are whining
in the street. The strong medicine
of life has burned their bellies and their
skins are wrinkled. Their bones have
become brittle and their voices weak.
They are too cold and too young. Words
without meaning drop from their lips.
In the attempt to walk on the rim of
life the half-gods have made themselves
engines of steel. The air is befouled. The
children of men choke in the streets.
My ears are befouled. I have got a
disease from sitting with half-gods in a
room. My clothes are befouled by the
stench of the engines.
AMBITION
I AM ONE who has walked out of a
tall building into the streets of a city
and over plains into a forest that fringes
a river. My notion is one of escape. I
can no longer bear the life led in my
father’s house. I am a child and cannot
escape out of my childhood. There is a
door through which I cannot enter, a wall
I cannot climb. The idea of escape long
ago attacked the seat of my reason — a
quaint fancy as well enough I know that
such a thing as reason cannot exist.
In the streets of a city, after I had
walked out at the window of a tall building,
a man came to walk with me. He
held a small stick in his hand and twirled
it over his finger. He said God would
forgive me my transgressions if I would
go in at the door of God’s house and
cease walking up and down.
God lies on the ground in the forest
with his head at the base of a tree.
The fingers of God flutter like the wings of a gnat.
A little leaf in the forest, touched by the
finger of God, whirls and twists in an agony of delight.
I have bathed in a stream and walked up
and down on prairies.
I have been lying at full length in Illinois.
I have put my hands into Iowa, into
Kentucky, into Indiana, Kansas, Ohio,
Nebraska, the Dakotas.
My mind is the mind of a little man
with thin legs who sells cigars in a store.
My mind is the mind of a cripple who
died in an alleyway at Cleveland, Ohio.
My mind is the mind of a child who fell
into a well, the mind of one who cleans
the streets of a city, of an actor who
walks up and down on a stage.
I double my fists and strike the ground
a sharp blow. Ridges of land squirt out
through my fingers.
I have remade the land of my fathers.
I have come out of my house to remake
the land.
I have made a flat place with the palms
of my hands.
IN A WORKINGMAN’S ROOMING HOUSE
AT TWO o’clock at night a steamboat
whistle blows in the Chicago River.
A man who lives above me gets out of bed
and goes barefooted across the floor. His
feet fall on the boards like the fingers of a
player on a silent piano filled with broken
strings.
He strikes a match. I know what he is
doing. He is lighting a candle in order
that God may see into his room and
remember him in the time of his death.
I do not arise and light a candle for the
sake of God. I lie still and think. God
has multiplied himself so often in my
sight that I cannot see him by the light
of a candle.
A MAN STANDING BY A BRIDGE
FOR A long time I had the illusion I
was helping to build a house. A
wind has blown the illusion away.
Building is going on but I have nothing to do
with it. It may be that you are the
builder.
I am perplexed with trying to find out
who does the building. I creep in the
dusty hallways and hear many strange
voices. The voices of men and women
resound out of the darkness.
The voices cry out to me that they are
the voices of builders but as I go forward,
feeling with my hands on the walls, I do
not come to the place of the building.
A soft voice has whispered to me that
there is no such thing as a builder. It
was a woman’s voice. “The noise you
hear is made by heavy untruths in the
hands of arrogant men. The men lean
out of a window. They beat on a brazen
sky.
They are trying to make holes in
the sky.”
THE RED THROATED BLACK
GIVE me the word,
Let my red throat and black lips
caress the words of your lips.
Give me the word.
Give me three words, a dozen, a hundred,
a history.
Give me the word.
Give me the word.
Throw a curse at my head.
Throw a threat at my eyes.
Give me the word.
Give me the word.
I will melt song into your words.
I will color your words with song.
I will eat your words and vomit forth song.
Give me the word.
Put a sweet word under my tongue.
My blood is still hot.
The word shall take root. It shall grow.
It shall flower.
Give me the word.
I shall breathe perfume into your words.
I shall make a new word of your word.
My throat is a hot womb in which the
seeds of words have been sown.
Give me the word.
Give me your God.
Give me the Lord God.
Give me Saul and David.
Give me Bildad and Shuhite.
Give me the word.
Give me the stinging end of a whip.
Give me your Christ that died.
Give me the word.
Give me the word.
Give me the word.
Let me put my hands on the word.
Let me touch my red tongue to the word.
Give me the Lord.
Give me the Lord God.
Give me sweet words. Give me profane
words.
My throat hungers for words.
My throat is the womb of song.
My lips shall lap the red wounds of song.
Give me the word.
Give me the word.
I am the singer.
Give me the word.
SINGING SWAMP NEGRO
I’LL BRING tears to your eyes with song,
Let me sing.
When I am gone, when I have consumed
the poison my song shall roll and echo
along rivers,
It shall roll through the graveyards of
forests,
O’er fields,
Along deserted wharfs, where ships rot in the sun,
In swamps,
In deserted cabins,
In the hearts of the brethren — gone white.
Let me sing.
Did you hear me singing at night — in the
morning? Did you know I was the soul of song?
Did you hear the song singing in my legs,
my feet, my back, my arms?
Did you hear the wild song, the true song?
Did you see song come into life? Did you
see it play up and down the black skin
of my back?
Let me sing.
I was the song.
I sang as a fish swims. I sang light into dark places.
I took hold of the hand of the mother of song.
I took hold of the hand of the mother of sorrow.
I danced in the night under a moon.
Let me sing.
I am the Christ you crucified.
Why did you bring me the Christ that died?
Let me sing.
I am the song that does not die in the
throat. I am myself the sweet inner meaning of song.
Let me sing.
I will bring tears to your eyes with song.
My hands are building the tomb of song.
Song is dying in me.
Let me sing.
THOUGHTS OF A MAN PASSED IN A LONELY STREET AT NIGHT
I HAVE gone to walk up and down.
It is night and cold. I want to creep
into you. You have made me by thinking
of me and I declare you should be ashamed
of what you have done.
Why have you not made me more pure?
Why have you not made me more beautiful?
Your conception of me makes me a
little ill. It forces me to run away from
you into a field of fancy, into a forest of
doubt. If I cannot be one who when
weary lies in warm human layers of
thought I shall become for the nonce and
until I am rested something not human.
I have passed out of your presence.
I will multiply myself until I pass like
a vapor out of your mind.
I am a thing hung suspended in life.
There is no life in me, only a desire to
creep into your arms and sleep after my
long walking up and down.
CITIES
THE NOTION of becoming a Jeremiah
pleases my childish fancy. I
shall be a Jeremiah in the mood that
comes over God when he amuses himself
by tickling a solitary leaf in a forest.
I shall walk a long way and sit down
in the grass. When night comes I shall
weep. The hot tears that run out of my
eyes shall make a little stream in which
fishes shall live.
My tears shall be many and shall make
a broad river over which birds shall fly in
the light of a morning.
My tears shall mature a stalk of corn that
shall feed a little mouse that shall nibble
forever at the foundations of buildings
within which the fancies of men have
decayed.
A YOUTH SPEAKING SLOWLY
I STAND here on a prairie near a
town. Do you understand that distance
has always been there, before me,
that I breathe distance, that it flows
through me like a prairie wind?
There is Europe there, and Africa and
the land of the Russ. I hear voices out of
your places but they remain voices. I
shall never touch the flesh or soul of you.
I put you aside. You are not in my distance, that I know.
I step three paces forward then I stop.
The wall recedes and stops before me.
In what way does it matter?
You are there at the edge of another town.
You are in a cornfield.
You are in the streets of Denver looking
over the vast rim of my bowl.
You are in the Alleghany Mountains
looking down at me.
You are in any city of the plains looking
out at a factory window or out at the
window of a house.
Houses and factories are but symbols to
us. They are toys that amuse our children
because they are so small in our vast place.
It is my passionate desire to shatter
distances.
It is my passionate desire to distill, to
condense.
Push my wall over and a world will be
destroyed and new worlds will emerge.
It is only because I am so young that I
push with my feeble arms against the
face of the wall.
ONE WHO SOUGHT KNOWLEDGE
THERE are just as many things to be
found out as anyone knows. No
one I have ever met or talked with knows
very much.
Books are not such great things and
most writers of books are fools. Believe
me that is true. How many books I have
read. How many singers I have gone to
hear sing. How many times I have gone
to galleries to see what paintings painters
have painted.
do not need to be afraid we will be late
to the battle.
THE MINISTER OF GOD
I WAS on my knees at prayer in a
quiet dark place when lust for women
came to me.
A PERSISTANT LOVER
IT IS EARLY morning and you and
I have shaken the sleep out of our
bodies and have renewed our covenant.
We have struck with the flat part of our
hands the face of the wall. We have
bowed our heads in the midst of a cloud
of vapor. By the strength of our understanding
and by that alone we now stand on our feet.
We stand upon our feet in the midst of the waters.
The hillside and green stretches of
country, that yesterday seemed to draw
near, have receded out of our sight. In
our place the grey surface of the waters
runs in little ridges, changing color a
little as the years pass and the days pass.
The waters go on. In their neverending
movement the waters achieve the
insanity we seek in vain. There is a
persistent roaring noise, but the waters do
not break upon the rocks. In the air
above our heads sound breaks against
sound. The hammering voices have not
stopped since the forgotten dawn long
ago when I found you standing alone.
In the morning at the break of dawn
there is a moment of quiet. The noises
do not cease but there is quiet.
In the evening when the day runs like
a frightened rabbit into the hole of night
there is quiet.
It would be a comfort to me to know
that at this moment at the beginning of
our day our minds run together.
It would be a comfort to me to know
that as your mind runs like a tardy streak
of light at the heels of night my mind
also runs.
It would be a joy to me to know that
our two minds plunge forward together
into the receding distance, over the
waters.
In my perplexity I lift my foot out of
the firm sand at the bottom of the river
and then set it slowly down.
My head rocks from side to side.
My hands are like branches of trees.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 323