Localities

 WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw
And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek.


Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices,
Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets,
The fly-by-night towns of Bull Frog and Skiddoo,
The night-cool limestone white of Death Valley,
The straight drop of eight hundred feet
From a shelf road in the Hasiampa Valley:
Men and places they are I never saw.


I have seen three White Horse taverns,
One in Illinois, one in Pennsylvania,
One in a timber-hid road of Wisconsin.


I bought cheese and crackers
Between sun showers in a place called White Pigeon
Nestling with a blacksmith shop, a post-office,
And a berry-crate factory, where four roads cross.


On the Pecatonica River near Freeport
I have seen boys run barefoot in the leaves
Throwing clubs at the walnut trees
In the yellow-and-gold of autumn,
And there was a brown mash dry on the inside of their hands.

On the Cedar Fork Creek of Knox County
I know how the fingers of late October
Loosen the hazel nuts.

I know the brown eyes of half-open hulls.

I know boys named Lindquist, Swanson, Hildebrand.

I remember their cries when the nuts were ripe.

And some are in machine shops; some are in the navy;
And some are not on payrolls anywhere.

Their mothers are through waiting for them to come home.

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