Weldon Kees: The Lease Is Up

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Going to back door to ask for handout, Omaha, Nebraska: photo by John Vachon. November 1938

Walk the horses down the hill
Through the darkening groves;
Pat their rumps and leave the stall;
Even the eyeless cat perceives
Things are not going well.

Fasten the lock on the drawingroom door,
Cover the tables with sheets:
This is the end of the swollen year
When even the sound of the rain repeats:
The lease is up, the time is near.

Pull the curtains to the sill,
Darken the rooms, cut all the wires.
Crush the embers as they fall
From the dying fires:
Things are not going well.

Leaving house from which he failed to get something to eat, Omaha, Nebraska: photo by John Vachon, November 1938

Abandoned farm, Nebraska: photo by John Vachon, November 1938

Window in rooming house, Omaha, Nebraska: photo by John Vachon, November 1938 

 

Weldon Kees (b. 24 February 1915, Beatrice, Nebraska; d. 18 July 1955[?], San Francisco, California): When the Lease is Up, from The Last Man, 1943

Photos by John Vachon (b. St. Paul, Minnesota, 14 May 1914; d. 20 April 1975, New York, New York) from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

Weldon Kees grew up in Nebraska during the Depression years. He was the only child of John Kees, a prosperous businessman who ran the F.D. Kees Manufacturing Company (producers of handles, hooks, cornhuskers and other hardware items) and was for a time president of the Nebraska Association of Manufacturers; the poet's mother, Sarah, claimed membership of the Society of Americans of Royal Descent.  At the time John Vachon, a fellow native of the prairie region, took these pictures, Kees would have been in Lincoln, working on a guide to Nebraska for the Federal Writers' Project.