Classic Poem

What the people learn out of lifting and hauling and waiting and losing and laughing
Goes into a scroll, an almanac, a record folding and unfolding, and the music goes down and around:
The story goes on and on, happens, forgets to happen, goes out and meets itself coming in, puts on disguises and drops them.
“Yes, yes, go on, go on, I'm listening.” You hear that in one doorway.
And in the next, “Aw shut up, close your trap, button your tongue, you talk too much.”
The people, yes, the people,
To the museum, the aquarium, the planetarium, the zoo, they go by thousands, coming away to talk about mummies, camels, fish and stars,
The police and constables holding every one of them either a law-breaker or lawabiding.
The fingerprint expert swears no two of them ever has finger lines and circlings the same.
The handwriting expert swears no one of them ever writes his name twice the same way.
To the grocer and the banker they are customers, depositors, investors.
The politician counts them as voters, the newspaper editor as readers, the gambler as suckers.
The priest holds each one an immortal soul in the care of Almighty God.
bright accidents from the chromosome
spill from the color bowl of the
chromosomes some go under in early
bubbles some learn from desert blossoms how to lay up and use thin
hoardings of night mist

In an old French town
the mayor ordered the people
to hang lanterns in front of their houses
which the people did
but the lanterns gave no light
so the mayor ordered they must
put candles in the lanterns
which the people did
but the candles in the lanterns gave no light
whereupon the mayor ordered
they must light the candles in the lanterns
which the people did
and thereupon there was light.

The cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education.
All she needs for housekeeping is a can opener.
They'll fly high if you give them wings.
Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.
Everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it.
The auk flies backward so as to see where it's been.
Handle with care women and glass.
Women and linen look best by candlelight.
One hair of a woman draws more than a team of horses.
Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.
You can send a boy to college but you can't make him think.
The time to sell is when you have a customer.
Sell the buffalo hide after you have killed the buffalo.
The more you fill a barrel the more it weighs unless you fill it with holes.
A pound of iron or a pound of feathers weighs the same.
Those in fear they may cast pearls before swine are often lacking in pearls.
May you live to eat the hen that scratches over your grave.
He seems to think he's the frog's tonsils but he looks to me like a plugged nickel.
If you don't like the coat bring back the vest and I'll give you a pair of pants.
The coat and the pants do the work but the vest gets the gravy.
“You are singing an invitation to summer,” said the teacher, “you are not defying it to come.”

“Sargeant, if a private calls you
a dam fool, what of it?”
“I'd throw him in the guard house.”
“And if he just thinks you're a dam
fool and don't say it, then what?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, let it go at that.”
The white man drew a small circle in the sand
and told the red man, “This is what the Indian
knows,” and drawing a big circle around the
small one, “This is what the white man knows.”
The Indian took the stick and swept an immense
ring around both circles: “This is where the
white man and the red man know nothing.”
On the long dirt road from Nagadoches to Austin
the pioneer driving a yoke of oxen and a cart
met a heavy man in a buggy driving a team
of glossy black horses.
“I am Sam Houston, Governor of the State of Texas,
and I order you to turn out of the road for me.”
“I am an American citizen and a taxpayer of Texas
and I have as much right to the road as you.”
“That is an intelligent answer and I salute you
and I will turn out of the road for you.”
What did they mean with that Iowa epitaph:
“She averaged well for this vicinity”?
And why should the old Des Moines editor
say they could write on his gravestone:
“He et what was sot before him”?
“I never borrowed your umbrella,” said a
borrower, “and if I did I brought it back.”
He was quiet as a wooden-legged man on a tin
roof and busy as a one-armed paper-hanger
with the hives.
When a couple of fried eggs were offered the
new hired man he said, “I don't dirty my
plate for less than six.”
Why did the top sergeant tell the rookie, “Put
on your hat, here comes a woodpecker”?
“Whiskey,” taunted the Irish orator, “whiskey
it is that makes you shoot at the landlords
—and miss 'em!”
“Unless you learn,” said the father to the son,
“how to tell a horse chestnut from a chest-
nut horse you may have to live on soup made
from the shadow of a starved pigeon.”
Said Oscar neither laughing nor crying: “We fed
the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats
and was just getting into the big money when
the whole thing went blooey on account of the
overproduction of rats and cats.”
Where you been so long?
What good wind blew you in?
Snow again, kid, I didn't get your drift.
Everything now is either swell or lousy.
“It won't be long now,” was answered,
“The worst is yet to come.”
Of the dead merchant prince whose holdings
were colossal the ditch-digger queried,
“How much did he leave? All of it.”
“What do you want to be?”
T. R. asked.
Bruere answered, “Just an
earthworm turning over a
little of the soil near me.”
“Great men never feel great,”
say the Chinese.
“Small men never feel small.”