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Pick Offs

by Carl Sandburg, 1920

The telescope picks off star dust
 on the clean steel sky and sends it to me.

 The telephone picks off my voice and
 sends it cross country a thousand miles.

 The eyes in my head pick off pages of
 Napoleon memoirs... a rag handler,
 a head of dreams walks in a sheet of
 mist... the palace panels shut in nobodies
 drinking nothings out of silver
 helmets... in the end we all come to a
 rock island and the hold of the sea-walls.

Published in Smoke and Steel
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