Works

Of John Cabanis, wrath and of the strife
Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat
Who led the common people in the cause
Of freedom for Spoon River, and the fall
Of Rhodes, bank that brought unnumbered woes...

I am a certain god
Who slipped down from a remote height
To a place of pools and stars.
And I sat invisible
Amid a clump of trees
To watch the madmen.

There were cries and groans about me,...

The: Prohibitionists made me Town Marshal
When the saloons were voted out,
Because when I was a drinking man,
Before I joined the church, I killed a Swede
At the saw-mill near Maple Grove....

Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown
Who lies here with no stone to mark the place.
As a boy reckless and wanton,
Wandering with gun in hand through the forest...

"An inquisition taken for the people
Of the State of Illinois here at LeRoy,
County aforesaid, on the 7th of August,
Anna Domini, nineteen hundred nineteen,
Before me, William Merival, coroner...

Ye young debaters over the doctrine
Of the soul's immortality
I who lie here was the village atheist,
Talkative, contentious, versed in the arguments
Of the infidels. But through a long sickness...

Of that dear vale where you and I have lain
Scanning the mysteries of life and death
I dreamed, though how impassable the space
Of time between the present and the past!...

If the grim Fates, to stave ennui,
Play whips for fun, or snares for game,
The liar full of ease goes free,
And Socrates must bear the shame.

With the blunt sage he stands despised,...

Very well, you liberals,
And navigators into realms intellectual,
You sailors through heights imaginative,
Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets,
You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits,...

This I saw with my own eyes: A cliff - swallow
Made her nest in a hole of the high clay-bank
There near Miller's Ford.
But no sooner were the young hatched
Than a snake crawled up to the nest...

Reading in Ovid the sorrowful story of Itys,
Son of the love of Tereus and Procne, slain
For the guilty passion of Tereus for Philomela,
The flesh of him served to Tereus by Procne,...

I was a lawyer like Harmon Whitney
Or Kinsey Keene or Garrison Standard,
For I tried the rights of property,
Although by lamp-light, for thirty years,
In that poker room in the opera house....

At first I suspected something -
She acted so calm and absent-minded.
And one day I heard the back door shut
As I entered the front, and I saw him slink
Back of the smokehouse into the lot...

Well, then, another drink! Ben Jonson knows,
So do you, Michael Drayton, that to-morrow
I reach my fifty-second year. But hark ye,
To-morrow lacks two days of being a month -...

Dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt


From the Cordilleran Highlands,
From the Height of Land
Far north.
From the Lake of the Woods,
From Rainy Lake,
From Itasca's springs....

Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist,
What will result from compounding
Fluids or solids.
And who can tell
How men and women will interact
On each other, or what children will result?...

You dull Goliaths clothed in coats of blue,
Strained and half bursted by the swell of flesh,
Topped by Gorilla heads. You Marmoset,
Trained scoundrel, taught to question and ensnare,...

My parents thought that I would be
As great as Edison or greater:
For as a boy I made balloons
And wondrous kites and toys with clocks
And little engines with tracks to run on...

Rich, honored by my fellow citizens,
The father of many children, born of a noble mother,
All raised there
In the great mansion - house, at the edge of town.
Note the cedar tree on the lawn!...

Do you remember, O Delphic Apollo,
The sunset hour by the river, when Mickey M'Grew
Cried, "There's a ghost," and I, "It's Delphic Apollo,".
And the son of the banker derided us, saying, "It's light...