My hands are like the mottled backs of
poplar trees that stand upright in a
snowstorm that blows down a hill.
I look at my hands and think of minute
physical things concerning myself because
I am loath to begin again thinking of you.
When I lift my eyes the day will be here.
I will see the wet strands of hair falling
across your breasts.
Your tired eyes will look into mine.
The uselessness of all effort will be
indicated by the droop of your shoulders.
An impulse toward love will tighten the
cords of my throat.
I will note again the nakedness of you,
the smallness of the trunk of your body,
the way the corners of your mouth twitch
with weariness.
The lids of your eyes are always very
heavy and grey in the shifting light at the
beginning of a day.
How would it be with me if I could
ride like a passenger on the back of your
mind.
When I have tried we both sank out of
sight under the waters.
Your mind should have been a boat in
which we could lie together, sleeping and
resting, but I am afraid then I should
have become truly insane and run away
in the night.
It has not gone well with us as we
walked, going ever more and more slowly
forward into the drifting current of days.
We have walked too long on the face of
the waters. More than once I have kept
silent when I wanted to thrust you away,
out of my sight.
Had I raised my hand to strike, our
two hands would have met in the air
above the waters.
There would have been a more and
more terrible hammering of sound against sound.
Had I raised my hand to strike, my
hand would have met your hand also
intent upon striking.
You have hidden yourself from me
with lovely assurance.
I did not want to know the thoughts
that came to you in the midst of the day.
I wanted your thoughts put away.
Your legs have grown blue and as we
stand in the waters my own legs have
grown brittle.
The dawn has come.
The hammering of sound against sound
begins in the air over our heads.
I raise my eyes to your eyes.
In a moment perhaps words will come to my lips.
In a moment, my beloved, I shall tell you
anew the story of how, in a grey dawn
long ago, I found you standing alone.
THE VISIT IN THE MORNING
IT was by the sea —
I was lying on my belly and God
came and turned me over.
He turned my face out of the sand, the
yellow sightless sand.
God caressed me and his caress was
gentle and soft.
Out of my eyes he took what was sightless,
Out of my ears deafness.
It has been permitted me to live and
that was sweet before your time..
The Divine inheritance God gave in
the morning.
He kissed my lips, my breasts, my arms,
Then my lips again.
Have you walked by a mountain?
Have you walked by the sea?
I have been in the veins of the mountains.
I have been in each drop of water God
spat out of his mouth.
A wind blowing out of my ears troubled
the waters of the seas.
God came to me as a bird comes out
of a bush — softly — into a breaking day.
God came to me in a glaring light.
I have gone into you.
I have become of you.
In my pocket is the key to your house.
In my veins your blood flows.
The breath of you inflates my lungs.
The sweetness of you sleeps in my sleep.
If you do not understand what I am
saying that is of no importance.
That the winds blow in trees and that
deaf men walk under the branches
leading the sightless is of no importance.
I was by the sea when God came to me.
He turned me over, turned my face out
of the eyeless yellow sand.
He kissed my lips and I became alive.
THE DUMB MAN
THERE is a story. I cannot tell it.
I have no words. The story is
almost forgotten but sometimes I remember.
The story concerns three men in a
house in a street. If I could say the
words I would sing the story. I would
whisper it into the ears of women, of
mothers. I would run through the world
saying it over and over. My tongue
would be torn loose. It would rattle
against my lips.
The three men are in a room in a house.
One is young and dandified. He continually laughs.
There is a second man who has a long
white beard. He is consumed with doubt
but occasionally his doubt leaves him
and he sleeps.
A third man there is who has wicked
eyes and who moves nervously about the
room rubbing his hands together.
The three men are waiting, waiting.
Upstairs in the house there is a woman
standing with her back to a wall, in half
darkness by a window.
That is the foundation of the story.
Everything I will ever know is distilled in it.
I remember a fourth man came to the
house, a white silent man. Everything
was as silent as the sea at night. His feet
on the stone floor of the room where the
three men were made no sound.
The man with wicked eyes became like
a boiling liquid. He ran back and forth
like a caged animal. The old grey man
was infected by his nervousness. He
kept pulling at his beard.
The fourth man, the white one, went
upstairs to the woman.
There she was — waiting.
How silent the house was. How loudly
all the clocks in the neighborhood ticked.
The woman upstairs craved love. That
must have been the story. She hungered
for love with her whole being. She wanted
to create in love. When the white silent
man came into her presence she sprang
forward. Her lips were parted. There
was a smile on her lips.
The white one said nothing. In his
eyes there was no rebuke, no question.
His eyes were as impersonal as stars.
Downstairs the wicked one whined and
ran back and forth like a little lost hungry
dog. The grey one tried to follow him
about but presently grew tired and lay
down on the floor to sleep. He never
awoke again.
The dandified fellow lay on the floor
too. He laughed and played with his
tiny black mustache.
I have no words to tell what happened
in my story. I cannot tell the story.
The white silent one may have been
death.
The waiting eager woman may have been life.
&nbs
p; Both the grey bearded man and the
wicked one puzzle me. I think and think
but do not understand them. Most of
the time I do not think of them at all.
I keep thinking about the dandified
man who laughed all through my story.
If I could understand him
I could understand everything. I could run through
the world telling a wonderful story. I
would no longer be dumb.
Why was I not given words? Why was
I not given a mind? Why am I dumb?
I have a wonderful story to tell but know
no way to tell it.
Previously printed in “The Triumph of the Egg”.
A POET
IF I COULD be brave enough and
live long enough I could crawl inside
the life of every man, woman and child
in America. After I had gone within them
I could be born out of them. I could
become something the like of which has
never been seen before. We would see
then what America is like.
A MAN RESTING FROM LABOR
THIS TREE on which I am sitting in
the forest fell down here and lies
slowly rotting. Little crawling worms
live in it. They are crawling near where I
sit. The tree was not afraid or ashamed
to fall down. The tree was not afraid or
ashamed to grow or to die.
The sunlight comes down through the
leaves of these trees unafraid and unashamed.
The wind blows when it does blow.
A STOIC LOVER
I SAW HER little figure near the wall.
She did not see me though she
sensed my presence. I was like a statue
with folded hands and she was like a
little dog with quivering flanks that
coldly waits beside a farmhouse door.
Such a tiny thing she was.
She whined and with her fingers scratched the wall.
Her shaking flanks made a kind of music too.
It was not winter.
Spring came on. The lovely breath of
spring blew in her face. She whined and
scratched the wall.
I saw her nervous fingers making
towns and streets. She played at living
desperately. She built and built, caressed
her own breasts, then fell to tearing at
the wall.
I sat stone still and watched.
Her quivering flanks set up a tremor in
my frame.
My body shook and dust fell down from
my eyes.
I moved and lived and felt the breath of
spring and life blow in my face.
A YOUNG JEW
DEARS and a life of it,
Sitting in a room,
Walking with my father in a street,
Hungering,
Hating,
Burning my flame out in an empty place.
The smoke from burning bodies goes
straight up.
Fire everywhere.
My world is choked with smoke of
burning men,
With smoldering fumes of fires,
With smoke of burning men.
My mother’s eyes look out at burning men,
At men who burn out in an empty place.
My mother’s breasts are tipped with flames.
She has suckled men in fire.
She has suckled me in flames.
Her breasts are tipped with flames.
My mother’s eyes look out at burning men.
My father’s eyes look back at old things
burned and charred.
They are hungering in the streets,
Their eyes are tipped with flames,
Their eyes flee from their bodies,
hungering in the streets.
THE STORY TELLER
TALES are people who sit on the
doorstep of the house of my mind.
It is cold outside and they sit waiting.
I look out at a window.
The tales have cold hands.
Their hands are freezing.
A short thickly-built tale arises and
threshes his arms about.
His nose is red and he has two gold teeth.
There is an old female tale sits hunched up in a cloak.
Many tales come to sit for a moment
on the doorstep and then go away.
It is too cold for them outside.
The street before the door of the house of
my mind is filled with tales.
They murmur and cry out, they are
dying of cold and hunger.
I am a helpless man — my hands
tremble.
I should be sitting on a bench like a tailor.
I should be weaving warm cloth out of
the threads of thought.
The tales should be clothed.
They are freezing on the doorstep of the
house of my mind.
I am a helpless man — my hands
tremble.
I feel in the darkness but cannot find the
doorknob.
I look out at a window.
Many tales are dying in the street before
the house of my mind.
Previously printed in “The Triumph of the Egg.”
A THINKER
I SEE YOU, my beloved, sitting in a
room beside me but I cannot speak
to you. There is not time. You are young
now but when I have turned my head to
blow the smoke from before my eyes you
shall grow old. I do turn my head again.
You are a mumbling old woman. It is
useless to speak to you. You are full of
memories, crammed with them. There is
no room for me to enter into you.
It is quite true my beloved that I have
always seen you as through a glass
darkly. I see all life so.
You are floating in a medium outside
my own. That must be quite apparent.
All men and women I have ever seen
were floating in a medium outside my
own. I a little understand the necessity
for that — now. The day for the cure has
not come. The time when God will
breathe life into our nostrils lies lost in the future.
That I have touched you and others
with my hands, held you in my arms,
caressed your tired eyes, awakened at
night to see you asleep beside me — all
facts, beliefs, suspicions, touching our
belief in the reality of any approach we
have made to each other are myths,
fairy tales we have whispered to ourselves
in the darkness of long nights.
I believe that.
However there is something more
curious than what I am now saying to
you. The fact of the impossibility of an
approach to each other is so obviously
curious. It is curious as the formation of
a cliff may be curious. It is puzzling as
the slippery, exhausted cross rhythms of
waves are puzzling. You have seen the
waves run on when the wind died on the
face of the sea. You have seen many
things I have seen.
We have not approached the time
when we may speak to each other but in
the mornings, sometimes I have heard,
echoing far off, the sound of a trumpet.
It is apparent that nations cannot
exist for us. They are the playthings of
chi
ldren, such toys as children break
from boredom and weariness. The branch
of a tree is my country. My freedom
sleeps in a mulberry bush.
What remains that is articulate is
simply my desire to express to you
something out of the now, the present. It is
morning and you have gone, quite nude,
to bathe on a beach. I see you there and
you are lovely. Your head is turned a
little to one side. Listen. I have put the
bugle to my lips. Do you hear faintly the
sound of it, running on the face of the
waters. How stupidly I blow the trumpet.
There is no music in me.
I consume myself in my own attempt
to find myself. It is thus I die, hourly, in
every moment.
You must understand however that
it is my desire to communicate to you
something out of the now, the present.
I am a sea and a wind sweeps across
the face of me. My words are little
waves, thrust up. They are attempts to
grasp, to lay hold of a passing thing. My
words have, I well know, little to do with
the actuality of you and of me.
Yesterday a disease attacked the fields
here, back of my house. A million winged
grasshoppers descended upon the field.
As I walked they arose in clouds. The
grass in the field has become suddenly
brown and dead. What was green has
become brown, an ashy grey. Tomorrow
another disease, a trick of the wind, a
match thrown into dead grass will carry
the grasshoppers away.
It is true that you and I have looked
about us a little. We have seen how
empires are formed and civilizations crushed
as a grasshopper is crushed under foot.
There would be tragedy in that if
empires or civilizations mattered to us.
If I am a sea into which you may
throw things there is a purpose in that.
It is that things may be thrown into me that I exist.
Let us return to yourself and myself.
We stand here, now, in this instant, in
the presence of the breathing sea that is
myself, yourself, we are in the presence
of a wind that runs, we are at the head
of a street, watching the people pass, we
are in a forest under trees.
How strong, how swift, how sure we
are. The grasshopper in flight, the gull
twisting and turning in the air currents
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 324