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| 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, | 5 |
| 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, | 10 |
| 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, | 15 |
| 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, | 20 |
| 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. | 25 |
| 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. | 30 |
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