boxes on beach are empty shake ’em nails loosen they have been somewhere
Adapted from the poem Sand Scribblings by Carl Sandburg in Smoke and Steel as published in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1950.
The wind stops, the wind begins. The wind says stop, begin.
A sea shovel scrapes the sand floor. The shovel changes, the floor changes.
The sandpipers, maybe they know. Maybe a three-pointed foot can tell. Maybe the fog moon they fly to, guesses.
The sandpipers cheep ‘Here’ and get away. Five of them fly and keep together flying.
Night hair of some sea woman Curls on the sand when the sea leaves The salt tide without a good-by.
Boxes on the beach are empty. Shake ’em and the nails loosen. They have been somewhere.
This is special to me today as I know the boxes on the beach are empty.
They are empty because we emptied them.
We know they have been somewhere, because we filled them and moved them to the island … were we now live.
Got to go ride my bike to the NEARBY beach and scribble in the sand.
leaning against each other like drunken brothers at a funeral
Adapted from the poem, Even Numbers by Carl Sandburg as published in The People, Yes in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg by Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, Brace and Company: New York, 1950).
1
A HOUSE like a man all lean and coughing, a man with his two hands in the air at a cry,
“Hands up“
A house like a woman shrunken and stoop-shouldered, shrunken and done with dishes and dances
These two houses I saw going uphill in Cincinnati
2
Two houses leaning against each other like drunken brothers at a funeral,
Two houses facing each other like two blind wrestlers hunting a hold on each other.
These four scrawny houses I saw on a dead level cinder patch in Scranton, Pennsylvania
3
And by the light of a white moon m Waukesha, Wisconsin, I saw a lattice work in lilac time white-mist lavender a sweet moonlit lavender
Sorry but I just couldn’t resist.
Hey Little Brother!
Still in the drivers seat!
For those who know, they know,
For those who don’t know, that’s my little brother Pete watching me handle the reigns sitting in the drivers seat ( at the Dutch Village in Holland, Michigan).
I don’t have glasses yet and it looks like I still have my front teeth so this could have been the summer of 1968.
1969 was a rough year on my face.
I got glasses.
On my 9th birthday, I got hit in the face with a surf board that gashed my cheek open.
On Thanksgiving Day, running from my brother Timmy, I slipped and fell on the basement floor and chipped my left front tooth in half.
Still wear glasses.
Still have the scar.
One of grand daughters just lost her front teeth and asked her Mom if she could get a gold tooth like Pappa.
BTW, I should mention that this college basketball season, Michigan went undefeated on the road in the Big 10, something that hasn’t happened since 1976.
They tied the record of most regular season wins by a Big 10 team.
And in the process, the swept the home and away series with that team in East Lansing.
I cried over things knowing no beautiful things, not one, not one … lasts
Adapted from:
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts. The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, The mother of the year, the taker of seeds. The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, New beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, And the old things go, not one lasts.
Autumn by Carl Sandburg in Chicago Poems as published in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, (Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, 1950).
It’s just a building, I know.
And I know it was MASSIVELY renovated under Mr. Truman.
But understand, without much structural attention since being turned over to John Adams and being burned by the Brits in 1812, that building was falling down.
According to wikipedia:
By late 1948, three main options were considered for replacement of the White House:
Demolish and rebuild the interior, keeping the exterior walls intact.
Demolish the building entirely and construct a new executive mansion.
Demolish the building entirely, salvage the exterior walls and rebuild them and a new interior.
Two of the options were DEMOLISH ENTIRELY.
And the decision was made to Demolish and rebuild the interior, keeping the exterior walls intact.
Also from Wikipedia, Historic preservation of buildings during this time was not as strict or defined as it became later. For its time, simply not demolishing the entire structure was deemed “preservation”. Winslow envisioned many of the interior items – from doors, trim, woodwork, and ornamental plaster – would be reused. Most were carefully dismantled, labelled, catalogued, and stored. Much of the paneling was reinstalled in the main public rooms, but other historic elements were simply copied to accommodate increasing cost and time constraints. Many of the original materials that were not deemed of significantly identifiable historic value, such as marble fireplace mantels, or not deemed to be readily reused, such as pipes, were sent to landfills.
So is it the building where Mrs. Adams hung her laundry up in to dry, where Lincoln walked and FDR rolled?
Well not really, but there is this scene in my memory that I read about where Carl Sandburg, visited FDR in what is now the Yellow Room but in that day, was FDR’s study.
Sandburg, according to the story, stood at a window, hand on the window frame, and said something like, “This is where Lincoln stood, looking south to Virginia.”
FDR asked, “How can you know?”
Sandburg responded, “… I can tell.”
That window, the window Mr. Lincoln looked through, the window that Sandburg rested his hand on, that’s still there.
No Haiku For You 