Night-Gray Eyes
Carl Sandburg’s Complete Poems seems to be out of print. (One has to figure that if “rude, contemptuous, arrogant and subversive” Amazon.com doesn’t have it in stock, no one does. (Barnes & Noble is also out.))
It saddens me. Of all the poets I’ve read, Sandburg is most essentially American — not even Walt Whitman shares his love of common people or celebrates them with such candor and empathy.
He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry back in the day when the Pulitzer meant something, when journalism was a sacred craft inhabited by hard-drinking, chain-smoking reporters brought up as copy boys who got the facts straight before hammering them out as simple declarative sentences and not a profession populated by Ivy League assholes showing off their grasp of semiotics.
His work speaks to me in a way that few others do: I can spend hours poring over it and never grow weary. I get his images. He writes of common people in ordinary words that somehow become extraordinary when he strings them together.
Today’s entry in the poem-a-day for the month of April is a serenade for his wife.
Paula
Nothing else in this song—only your face.
Nothing else here—only your drinking, night-gray eyes.
The pier runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel.
I stand on the pier and sing how I know you mornings.
It is not your eyes, your face, I remember.
It is not your dancing, race-horse feet.
It is something else I remember you for on the pier mornings.
Your hands are sweeter than nut-brown bread when you touch me.
Your shoulder brushes my arm—a south-west wind crosses the pier.
I forget your hands and your shoulder and I say again:
Nothing else in this song—only your face.
Nothing else here—only your drinking, night-gray eyes.
—Carl Sandburg
Three of Sandburg’s early books are available online at Bartleby.com. They’re well worth reading.
