Then a couple of guys came in and one of them patted me on the back and then went over and looked at my old man and then pulled a sheet off the cot and and spread it over him; and the other was telephoning in French for them to send the ambulance to take him out to Maisons. And I couldn’t stop crying, crying and choking, sort of, and George Gardner came in and sat down beside me on the floor and put his arm around me and says, “Come on Joe old boy. Get up and we’ll go out and wait for the ambulance.”
George and I went out to the gate and I was trying to stop bawling and George wiped off my face with his handkerchief and we were standing back a little ways while the crowd was going out of the gate and a couple of guys stopped near us while we were waiting for the crowd to get through the gate and one of them was counting a bunch of mutuel tickets and he said, “Well Butler got his all right.”
The other guy said, “I don’t give a good goddam if he did, the crook. He had it coming to him on the stuff he’s pulled.”
“I’ll say he had,” said the other guy and tore the bunch of tickets in two.
And George Gardner looked at me to see if I’d heard and I had all right and he said, “Don’t you listen to what those bums said Joe. Your old man was one swell guy.”
But I don’t know. Seems like when they get started they dont leave a guy nothing.
TEN POEMS
Mitraigliatrice
The mills of the gods grind slowly;
But this mill
Chatters in mechanical staccato.
Ugly short infantry of the mind,
Advancing over difficult terrain,
Make this Corona
Their mitrailleuse.
Oklahoma
All of the Indians are dead
(a good Indian is a dead Indian)
Or riding in motor cars—
(the oil lands, you know, they’re all rich)
Smoke smarts my eyes,
Cottonwood twigs and buffalo dung
Smoke grey in the teepee—
(or is it myopic trachoma)
The prairies are long,
The moon rises,
Ponies
Drag at their pickets.
The grass has gone brown in the summer—
(or is it the hay crop failing)
Pull an arrow out:
If you break it
The wound closes.
Salt is good too
And wood ashes.
Pounding it throbs in the night—
(or is it the gonorrhea)
Oily Weather
The sea desires deep hulls—
It swells and rolls.
The screw churns a throb—
Driving, throbbing, progressing.
The sea rolls with love
Surging, caressing,
Undulating its great loving belly.
The sea is big and old—
Throbbing ships scorn it.
Roosevelt
Workingmen believed
He busted trusts,
And put his picture in their windows.
“What he’d have done in France!”
They said.
Perhaps he would—
He could have died
Perhaps,
Though generals rarely die except in bed,
As he did finally.
And all the legends that he started in his life
Live on and prosper,
Unhampered now by his existence.
Captives
Some came in chains
Unrepentent but tired.
Too tired but to stumble.
Thinking and hating were finished
Thinking and fighting were finished
Retreating and hoping were finished.
Cures thus a long campaign,
Making death easy.
Champs d’Honneur
Soldiers never do die well;
Crosses mark the places—
Wooden crosses where they fell,
Stuck above their faces.
Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch—
All the world roars red and black;
Soldiers smother in a ditch,
Choking through the whole attack.
Riparto d’Assalto
Drummed their boots on the camion floor,
Hob-nailed boots on the camion floor.
Sergeants stiff,
Corporals sore.
Lieutenant thought of a Mestre whore—
Warm and soft and sleepy whore,
Cozy, warm and lovely whore;
Damned cold, bitter, rotten ride,
Winding road up the Grappa side.
Arditi on benches stiff and cold,
Pride of their country stiff and cold,
Bristly faces, dirty hides—
Infantry marches, Arditi rides.
Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride—
To splintered pines on the Grappa side
At Asalone, where the truck-load died.
Montparnasse
There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows
No successful suicides.
A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.
(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome)
A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.
(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)
They find a model dead
alone in bed and very dead.
(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)
Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds
and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.
Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.
Along With Youth
A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boy’s letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday’s Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.
Chapter Heading
For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.
