| Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Smoke and Steel. 1922. |
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| VIII. Circles of Doors |
| 10. An Electric Sign Goes Dark |
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| POLAND, France, Judea ran in her veins, | |
| Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork. | |
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| “Won’t you come and play wiz me” she sang … and “I just can’t make my eyes behave.” | |
| “Higgeldy-Piggeldy,” “Papa’s Wife,” “Follow Me” were plays. | |
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| Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked. | 5 |
| Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name. | |
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| Twenty years old … thirty … forty … | |
| 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. | |
| And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths in France. | |
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| A voice, a shape, gone. | 10 |
| A baby bundle from Warsaw … legs, torso, head … on a hotel bed at The Savoy. | |
| The white chiselings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for packed houses: | |
| A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark. | |
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| She belonged to somebody, nobody. | |
| No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand. | 15 |
| She belonged to many thousand men, lovers of the white chiseling of arms and shoulders, the ivory of a laugh, the bells of song. | |
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| 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 | |
| Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead. | |
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