I look dreamily out over warm stagnant
waters. There is a reed grows out of the
yellow mud. In the orchard at my back
a hog grunts. An insect with brightly
colored back and wings comes swinging
down stream. He has lived more freely
than the waters of a river. I go with him
as I would go in at the door of God’s
house if I knew the street in which God’s
house stands, as I would go into you if
you would leave the door open for me.
YOUNG MAN IN A ROOM
THERE is a woman has just passed
by the door of my house. There was a
barely perceptible quickening of the
pulse of my body. “She is beautiful”, I
thought, and said so aloud. I arose and
went to the door to follow her with my
eyes. At the moment when I thought her
beautiful a wind had just come skipping
and shouting down the street. It lifted
the woman’s hat and she threw up her
hand. Her hand made a lovely gesture.
My neighbor the wind whispered the
story of her beauty to me.
NEGRO ON THE DOCKS AT MOBILE, ALA
I HAVE given out of the richness of
myself to many mornings.
At night when the waters of the seas
murmured I have murmured.
I have surrendered to seas and suns
and days and swinging ships.
My blood is thick with surrender, it
shall be let out through wounds and shall
color the seas and the earth.
My blood shall color the earth where
the seas come for the night kiss and the
seas shall be red.
I have come out and I shall go back.
I grew and I shall decay.
have given myself to days and nights.
I have been warm and cold. I have been
asleep and awake.
What you see with your eyes I do not
see.
What you have felt with your fingers
creeps unasked through my sleeping body.
I have not gone into your days and
your poison has not come into me.
I Open my body and drink — my soul is
sweet.
I have absorbed suns and seas and
days and your poison has not come into me.
WORD FACTORIES
LONG AGO an old man sat on a log
at the edge of a cornfield and talked
to me of God.
His words leaked away.
They would not stay in my head.
The rustling of the leaves of a tree near
at hand drowned his voice.
It ran the scale like the voice of an Oriental.
The little drums in my ears were tickled
by rising and diminishing waves of sound.
I His words ran into the rows of corn
and became rows of sounds, an army of sounds.
They hopped and ran like little naked children.
He did not teach me much of God but
fragments of God’s truth clung to me.
It fell on me like drops of warm rain
out of a wet sky.
Did I not learn from him that words are
living, breathing things. They are the
children of men that have been put to
work in a factory. Their little bodies
have become bent and stooped and twisted.
The female words have found no lovers.
They are barren.
It was not God’s wish that it be so.
I am one who would serve God.
Have not my brothers the male words
been castrated and made into eunuchs.
I would be nurse to many distorted words.
I would make my book a hospital for
crippled words.
From this day I shall wear a white
garment and deny myself the pleasures
of the body. The words of old time men
have been reborn in the factory towns of
my country. They are choked with
smoke and drowned in waves of new
sounds. Will you give a word nourishing
food, carry him for a day in the warm
body of yourself, as a maid carries with
due modesty a babe in her belly.
It is time for the old men to come back
out of their sleeping stupor.
They must sit again at the edge of the cornfields.
The words of our lips are being destroyed.
They are undernourished and work in the factories.
There is a tough gnarled new word
that has lived for a long time in a corner
of my brain. He has set up an insanity
there. Sometimes for days I do not dare
go near the corner of myself where the
word sits crouched, ready to strike, to
spring. I start to walk boldly in at the
door of my house and then grow afraid
and run away.
I run out of the present and into the past.
I run past clanging factory towns, past
long bridges, over lakes and seas, into
the deserts, into the forests.
It is by chance that I recover and
come back into myself.
A twisted word seeks warmth in a
corner of my brain. His body is bent and
his lips twitch. Something tells me he is
the son of an old sweet word born on a
hillside long ago in the night.
They have brought the little twisted
word into the West. In the service in
which they put him the air was bad. The
flying end of a broken wheel hit him and
broke his back. His body twitches when
he breathes. He lives but the air whines
and whistles as it works its way through
his lungs. He has escaped from his servitude and has got into my brain.
My twisted word will live long enough
to breed and to perpetuate his kind.
Bring me quickly the female words
that are barren and waiting.
If you do not hurry, my twisted word
will die in the corner of my brain.
I am a breeding place for a twisted word.
I await the time of the breeding.
MAN LYING ON A COUCH
I AM A TREE that grows beside the
wall. I have been thrusting up and
up. My body is covered with scars. My
body is old but still I thrust upwards,
creeping towards the top of the wall.
It is my desire to drop blossoms and
fruit over the wall.
I would moisten dry lips.
I would drop blossoms on the heads of
children over the top of the wall.
I would caress with falling blossoms
the bodies of those who live on the
farther side of the wall.
THE RIPPER
I CAN TELL it all quite sanely now.
Look at these hands, how quiet.
Look in these quiet eyes.
I went forth out of this iron house where
I have lived.
Myself black with hate,
Mothered I was at the breast of hate.
A knife was in my hand.
I ripped the people open as I came to
them,
Slashed them as a pig is slashed on
wintry mornings in a farmhouse yard.
Through dreary years I went,
Crawling on my belly in the dark,
Leaping,
Making my knife strokes
straight and true.
I cut them open every one.
In each the same dead child.
And then I came to her.
From her a child stepped forth and took
my hands,
A quiet child with quiet hands.
Look in these eyes, how quiet.
Look at these quiet hands.
ONE MAN WOULD NOT GROW OLD
I HAVE wished that the wind would
stop blowing, that birds would stop
dead still in their flight without falling
into the sea, that waves would stand
ready to break upon shores without
breaking, that all time, all impulse, all
movement, mood, hungers, everything
would stop and stand hushed and still
for a moment.
It would be wonderful to be sitting on
a log in a forest when it happened.
When all was still and hushed, just as
I have described, I would get off the log
and walk a little.
The insects would all lie still on the
ground or float fixed and silent in the air.
An old frog that lives under a stone and
that had opened his mouth to snap at a
fly would sit gaping.
There would be no movement in
Chicago, in New York, down by the
stock exchange, in towns, in factories, on
farms.
Away out in Colorado where a man is
at this moment riding his horse furiously
striving to catch a steer to be sent to
Chicago to be butchered and eaten —
He would stop and the steer would stop.
You and I would walk a little way in
the forest or on a prairie and stop. We
would be the only moving things in the
world and one of us would start a thought
rolling and rolling down time, down
space, down mind, down life too.
I am sure I would let you do it if later
you would be still and keep all the voices
of your mind hushed while I did it in my turn.
I would wait ten lives while others did
it for my turn.
THE NEW ENGLANDER
I TAKE this phone up, then put it
down and turn my back.
My fingers grope until they find its lips.
Here now, in this room, the spirit’s
sword has cut down sharp and clear.
There is as much to be found out as I
know or you know. I can put the world
down and can turn my back to it. I can
cut more worlds out of my silence than
you will ever build. I can feel the lips of
this thing, can caress its lips. Like David
I can tear the lion’s jaws apart.
The roaring world in my white hands
becomes a pool of whirling soot.
What I want to say to you can be said
in fifty ways. * * *
I have stood at the door of this house
now for many years.
I stand here with the knob held in my
hand.
I have seen you pass the house, going
forward in the street. I have seen snows
come and icy winds. In the spring the
green things grew for me as I have often
said they grew for you. The birds flew
past and in the evening darkness settled
down.
I have made a stone god of myself, at
my back a house, at my hand an open
door.
My dream is I shall pass through you
into the dawning of new days.
There is my condensed, compressed,
distilled desire, to go through doors, to
walk in hallways, walled about by life.
THE BUILDER
I AM building me a house slowly —
a house in which I may live. Day by
day the bricks are piled in long rows
making walls. Doors are hung and shingles
are being cut for the roof. The air is
heavy with the perfume of logs, new cut.
In the morning you may see my housebuilding
— in your street, on the corner
there by the church — in the valley beyond
your house where the road dips down and
crosses a bridge. It is morning and the
house is almost complete. Take this key.
Go in.
It is evening and my house is in ruins.
Weeds and vines have grown on the
broken walls. The rafters of the house I
aspired to build are buried in long grass.
They have decayed. Worms live in them.
You will find the ruins of my house in a
street of your town, on a country road,
in a long street black with smoke clouds
in a city.
This is a day, a week, a month, a year.
My house is not built. Would you come
into my house. Take this key. Come in.
My house is in the perfume of the wild
rose that grows by a roadside, it sleeps
in the eyes of a nigger who works on the
docks at New Orleans. It is built on the
foundation of a thought I have not dared
to express. I am not subtle enough to
build my house. The foundation walls
of my house stand on the shivering legs
of a little lost dog standing at the closed
door of your house on a cold morning in
November. The doors of my house creak
like the voice of a guinea hen. At night
the creaking of the doors of my house is
like the voice of a child given over to
sadness.
I am building me a house slowly. Take
this key. Go in.
YOUNG MAN FILLED WITH THE FEELING OF POWER
THE FIRM grip of my fingers on the
thin paper of this cigarette is a sign
I am very quiet now. Sometimes it is not
so. When I am unquiet I am weak but
when I am quiet, as I am now, I am
very strong.
Just now I went along one of the streets
of my city and in at a door and came up
here where I am now, lying on a couch
and looking out at a window. Very
suddenly and completely the knowledge
has come to me that I could grip the sides
of tall buildings as freely and as easily
as I now grip this cigarette. I could hold
the building between my fingers, put it to
my lips and blow smoke through it. I
could blow confusion away. I could blow
a thousand people out through the roof
of one tall building into the sky, into the
unknown. Building after building I could
consume as I consume the cigarettes in
this box. I could throw the burned ends
of cities over my shoulder and out through
a window.
It is not often I get in the state I am
now in — so quiet and sure of myself.
When the feeling comes over me there is
a directness and simplicity in me that
makes me love myself. To myself at such
times I say strong sweet words.
I am on a couch by this window and I
could ask a woman to come here to lie
with me or a man either for that matter.
I could take a row of houses standing
on a street, tip them over, empty the
people out of them, squeeze and compress
all the people into
one person and
love that person.
Do you see this hand? Suppose it held
a knife that could cut down through all
the falseness in you. Suppose it could
cut down through the sides of buildings
and houses where thousands of people
now lie asleep.
It would be something worth thinking
about if the fingers of this hand gripped
a knife that could cut and rip through
all the ugly husks in which millions of
lives are enclosed.
A DYING POET
TO EMANUEL CARNEVALI
I FOUND you fighting in the waves of a sea.
A soldier came to my house. His hands
were dirty. He had made a mess and besmeared himself.
He told me you had
thrown yourself into the sea. He said you
were fighting desperately to make your
way back out of the sea.
I went to the seashore but did not find you.
You were walking in the streets of a city.
Something had made you proud and arrogant.
You spoke of a goddess who walks by
the seashore in silence. She wears heavy
gold wristlets and in her hair is a chain of
finely wrought silver.
It was your intention to go on a long
journey. We spoke of the matter at
length. I watched you closely and understood
your most intimate thoughts. You
muttered that something had been sacrificed.
You spoke of blood that had befouled the grass in the fields.
For a long time I was absorbed in
watching you. Your coming cold and in
doubt out of the sea did not interest me
but your intention of going on a journey
was intensely interesting.
Your journey no doubt lasted a lifetime.
It lasted through the lifetime of
yourself and your father and grandfather.
Wherever you went you bathed yourself.
Bathing had become a passion with
you.
You bathed in a brook.
You bathed yourself with prayers in a church.
You bathed yourself with love in the
presence of men.
You went into a lonely place to bathe
yourself with thoughts.
What is the most curious fact of all is
that you became an unreality to me. For
a long time I had the notion that you had
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 326