from
Let the Railsplitter Awake
I.
West
of the Colorado
there's
a place I love.
There,
all that lives
passes
thru me—
what
I've been, what I am, what sustains me.
There,
the savage air
with
its thousand hands
sculpted
the high red rocks:
blind
scarlet rose from the abyss—
transformed
them to copper, strength, fire.
America,
spread like a buffalo skin
in
the clear & aery galloping night
above
the star-spread heights,
I
drink your cup of green dew.
Yes! thru bitter Arizona, gnarled Wisconsin
with
Milwaukee raised against wind & snow,
in
the flaming marshes of West Palm,
near
the pines of Tacoma,
in
the dense steel smell of your forests
I
wandered the earth, among
blue
leaves, cascading stones,
hurricanes
trembling with music,
rivers
like monasteries full of prayers,
geese,
apples, earth & water,
infinite
silence of growing wheat.
There, deep in the stone, I could
stretch eyes, ears, hands
to the air,
to
hear
books,
trains, snow, battles,
factories,
tombs, gardens, footsteps,
the
moon over the ship near Manhattan,
the
song of the weaving machine,
the
iron spoon eating the earth,
the
drill that hammers like a condor—
all
that cutting, pressing, running, stitching:
beings
lashed to wheels of birth and death.
I
love the farmer's little house.
New mothers sleep
in
aromas like the tamarind's, like clothes
newly
ironed. Fires
burn
in
a thousand homes & onions hang & dry.
(When
men sing near the river
their
voices are rough, like riverbottom stones:
tobacco rose in its wide leaves
& like a fire spirit
filled these houses).
Come
deeper, into Missouri, see the cheese & flour,
the
odorous planks, red as violins,
the
man navigating thru the barley,
the
newly mounted blue colt
who
sniffs & smells bread & alfalfa:
church
bells, poppies, blacksmith shops
&
in the rustic ramshackle theaters
Love
shows its mouth full of teeth
in
the earthborn dream.
What
we love is your peace, not your personae.
Your
warrior face shows no brotherly love.
You
are sisterly, spacious, North America—
you
come from a humble cradle, like a washerwoman
near
your rivers, in white.
Growing
in mystery,
your
sweetness is honeyed peace.
We
love your man, his hands red
with
Oregon clay, your black boy
who
brought you music
from
the ivory coast: we
love
your
city, substance,
light,
machines, your Western
energy,
the peaceful
honey
from hive & town,
the
giant boy on his tractor,
the
oats you inherited
from
Jefferson, the rumbling wheel
that
measures your terrestrial ocean,
factory
smoke, the thousandth
kiss
of a new colony:
we
love your worker's blood,
your
popular hand, full of oil.
Under
the prairie night, time
sleeps
over the buffalo skin in a grave
silence—sleeping
syllables, the song
of
what I was before birth, what we all were.
Melville
is a sea fir—his branches
curve
into a keel, one arm
of
timber & ship.
Whitman, numberless
as
grain, Poet in his dark
mathematics,
Dreiser, Wolfe,
fresh
wounds of our own absence,
&
more recently, Lockridge, all in the depths,
&
how many others in darkness;
over
these the same western dawn burns
&
from them we make what we are.
Mighty
infantry, blind captains
trembling
in action, among leaves,
stopped
by joy & grief
on
the plains crossed by traffic—
how
many unvisited dead in the flatlands:
tortured
innocents, prophets published recently,
over
the buffalo skin of the prairie.
From
France & Okinawa, from the atolls
of
Leyte (Norman Mailer has told this story),
from
the furious air, from the waves,
almost
all the boys have come back.
Almost
all . . . the history of mud & sweat
was
green & bitter; none heard
the
song of the reefs well enough,
nor
touched, except in death,
the
earth, bright fragrant crown of the islands:
blood
& shit
hounded
them, grease & rats—
the
desolate, exhausted heart fought on.
But
they've come back
&
you've received them
in
the wide open lands
&
those who've come back have closed up
like
a corolla of numberless anonymous petals,
to
be reborn & to forget.
Translated by David Cope