| |
| RUM tiddy um, | |
| tiddy um, | |
| tiddy um tum tum. | |
| My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves. | |
| I feel like tickling you under the chin—honey—and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross the Road? | 5 |
| When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck-pluck-put-akut and you—honey—put new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there ain’t too much rain or too little: | |
| Say, why do I feel so gabby? | |
Why do I want to holler all over the place?
. . . | |
| Do you remember I held empty hands to you | |
| and I said all is yours | 10 |
the handfuls of nothing?
. . . | |
| I ask you for white blossoms. | |
| I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees. | |
| I bring out “The Spanish Cavalier” and “In the Gloaming, O My Darling.” | |
| |
| The orchard here is near and home-like. | 15 |
| The oats in the valley run a mile. | |
| Between are the green and marching potato vines. | |
The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of fire: the potato bugs are asleep under their stiff and yellow-striped wings: here romance stutters to the western stars, “Excuse … me…”
. . . | |
| Old foundations of rotten wood. | |
| An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten-legged roaches shook up and scared by sunlight. | 20 |
| So a pickax digs a long tooth with a short memory. | |
Fire can not eat this rubbish till it has lain in the sun.
. . . | |
| The story lags. | |
| The story has no connections. | |
| The story is nothing but a lot of banjo plinka planka plunks. | 25 |
| |
The roan horse is young and will learn: the roan horse buckles into harness and feels the foam on the collar at the end of a haul: the roan horse points four legs to the sky and rolls in the red clover: the roan horse has a rusty jag of hair between the ears hanging to a white star between the eyes.
. . . | |
| In Burlington long ago | |
| And later again in Ashtabula | |
| I said to myself: | |
| I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet. | 30 |
| What else was there Shakespeare never told? | |
| There must have been something. | |
| If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia. | |
There was class to the way she went out of her head.
. . . | |
| Does a famous poet eat watermelon? | 35 |
| Excuse me, ask me something easy. | |
| I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfish on a Monday morning. | |
| |
| And the Japanese, two-legged like us, | |
| The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures. | |
| The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat. | 40 |
| |
| Why do I always think of niggers and buck-and-wing dancing whenever I see watermelon? | |
| |
| Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach baskets piled ten feet high. | |
| Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind along with peaches. | |
| I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong-honging across the town. | |
And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hayrack load of melons.
. . . | 45 |
| Niggers play banjos because they want to. | |
| The explanation is easy. | |
| |
| It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a policemen’s masquerade ball or a grocers-and-butchers’ picnic with a fat man’s foot race. | |
| It is the same as why boys buy a nickel’s worth of peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel’s worth. | |
| Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved. | 50 |
| The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory. | |
| It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split | |
| away from a school-room geography lesson | |
| in April when the crawfishes come out | |
| and the young frogs are calling | 55 |
| and the pussywillows and the cat-tails | |
know something about geography themselves.
. . . | |
| I ask you for white blossoms. | |
| I offer you memories and people. | |
| I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching vines. | 60 |
| I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like apple trees. | |
| I make up songs about things to look at: | |
| potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the garden with white spots; | |
| a cavalryman’s yellow silk handkerchief stuck in a flannel pocket over the left side of the shirt, over the ventricles of blood, over the pumps of the heart. | |
| |
| Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees. | 65 |
| Let romance stutter to the western stars, “Excuse … me…” | |
| |
