Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs

Rum tiddy um,tiddy um,tiddy um tum tum.My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves.I feel like tickling you under the chin—honey—and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross the Road?When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck-pluck-put-akut and you—honey—put new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there ain't too much rain or too little:Say, why do I feel so gabby ?Why do I want to holler all over the place?

Do you remember I held empty hands to youand I said all is yoursthe handfuls of nothing?

I ask you for white blossoms.I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.I bring out "The Spanish Cavalier" and "In the Gloaming, O My Darling."

The orchard here is near and home-like.The oats in the valley run a mile.Between are the green and marching potato vines.The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of fire: the potato bugs are asleep under their stiff and yellow-striped wings: here romance stutters to the western stars, "Excuse...me..."

Old foundations of rotten wood.An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten-legged roaches shook up and scared by sunlight.So a pickax digs a long tooth with a short memory.Fire can not eat this rubbish till it has lain in the sun.

The story lags.The story has no connections.The story is nothing but a lot of banjo plinka planka plunks.

The roan horse is young and will learn: the roan horse buckles into harness and feels the foam on the collar at the end of a haul: the roan horse points four legs to the sky and rolls in the red clover: the roan horse has a rusty jag of hair between the ears hanging to a white star between the eyes.

In Burlington long agoAnd later again in AshtabulaI said to myself:I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet.What else was there Shakespeare never told?There must have been something.If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia.There was class to the way she went out of her head.

Does a famous poet eat watermelon?Excuse me, ask me something easy.I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfishon a Monday morning.

And the Japanese, two-legged like us,The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures.The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat.

Why do I always think of niggers and buck-and-wing dancing whenever I see watermelon?

Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach baskets piled ten feet high.Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind along with peaches.I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong-honging across the town.And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hay-rack load of melons.

Niggers play banjos because they want to.The explanation is easy.

It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a policemen's masquerade ball or a grocers-and-butchers' picnic with a fat man's foot race.It is the same as why boys buy a nickel's worth of peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel's worth.Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved.The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory.It is the same as why boys go running lickety-splitaway from a school-room geography lessonin April when the crawfishes come outand the young frogs are callingand the pussywillows and the cat-tailsknow something about geography themselves.

I ask you for white blossoms.I offer you memories and people.I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching vines.I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like apple trees.I make up songs about things to look at:potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the garden with white spots;a cavalryman's yellow silk handkerchief stuck in a flannel pocket over the left side of the shirt, over the ventricles of blood, over the pumps of the heart.

Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.Let romance stutter to the western stars, "Excuse...me..."