Poland, France, Judea ran in her veins, <br />Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork. <br /> <br />“Won’t you come and play wiz me” she sang … and “I just can’t make my eyes behave.” <br />“Higgeldy-Piggeldy,” “Papa’s Wife,” “Follow Me” were plays. <br /> <br />Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked. <br />Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name. <br /> <br />Twenty years old … thirty … forty … <br />Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter, a cab driver. <br />And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths in France. <br /> <br />A voice, a shape, gone. <br />A baby bundle from Warsaw … legs, torso, head … on a hotel bed at The Savoy. <br />The white chiselings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for packed houses: <br />A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark. <br /> <br />She belonged to somebody, nobody. <br />No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand. <br />She belonged to many thousand men, lovers of the white chiseling of arms and shoulders, the ivory of a laugh, the bells of song. <br /> <br />Railroad brakemen taking trains across Nebraska prairies, lumbermen jaunting in pine and tamarack of the Northwest, stock ranchers in the middle west, mayors of southern cities <br />Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead.<br /><br />Carl Sandburg<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/an-electric-sign-goes-dark/
