Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Chicago Poems. 1916.
94. Shirt
I
Once many days ago I drank a glassful of something and the picture of you shivered and slid on top of the stuff.
And again it was nobody else but you I heard in the singing voice of a careless humming woman.
One night when I sat with chums telling stories at a bonfire flickering red embers, in a language its own talking to a spread of white stars:
It was you that slunk laughing
in the clumsy staggering shadows.
Broken answers of remembrance let me know you are alive with a peering phantom face behind a doorway somewhere in the city’s push and fury
Or under a pack of moss and leaves waiting in silence under a twist of oaken arms ready as ever to run away again when I tag the fluttering shirt of you.