Wagon wheel gap is a place I never saw <br />And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek. <br /> <br />Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices, <br />Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets, <br />The fly-by-night towns of Bull Frog and Skiddoo, <br />The night-cool limestone white of Death Valley, <br />The straight drop of eight hundred feet <br />From a shelf road in the Hasiampa Valley: <br />Men and places they are I never saw. <br /> <br />I have seen three White Horse taverns, <br />One in Illinois, one in Pennsylvania, <br />One in a timber-hid road of Wisconsin. <br /> <br />I bought cheese and crackers <br />Between sun showers in a place called White Pigeon <br />Nestling with a blacksmith shop, a post-office, <br />And a berry-crate factory, where four roads cross. <br /> <br />On the Pecatonica River near Freeport <br />I have seen boys run barefoot in the leaves <br />Throwing clubs at the walnut trees <br />In the yellow-and-gold of autumn, <br />And there was a brown mash dry on the inside of their hands. <br />On the Cedar Fork Creek of Knox County <br />I know how the fingers of late October <br />Loosen the hazel nuts. <br />I know the brown eyes of half-open hulls. <br />I know boys named Lindquist, Swanson, Hildebrand. <br />I remember their cries when the nuts were ripe. <br />And some are in machine shops; some are in the navy; <br />And some are not on payrolls anywhere. <br />Their mothers are through waiting for them to come home.<br /><br />Carl Sandburg<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/localities/
