As though you touched hands with some ancient clown, -A little while gaze absently below
And hum Deep River with them while they go.
Yes, turn again and sniff once more-look see,
O Sheriff, Brakeman and Authority-
Hitch up your pants and crunch another quid,
For you, too, feed the River timelessly.
And few evade full measure of their fate;
Always they smile out eerily what they seem.
I could believe he joked at heaven's gate-
Dan Midland-jolted from the cold brake-beam.
Down, down-born pioneers in time's despite,
Grimed tributaries to an ancient flow-
They win no frontier by their wayward plight,
But drift in stillness, as from Jordan's brow.
You will not hear it as the sea; even stone
Is not more hushed by gravity . . . But slow,
As loth to take more tribute-sliding prone
Like one whose eyes were buried long ago
The River, spreading, flows-and spends your dream.
What are you, lost within this tideless spell?
You are your father's father, and the stream-
A liquid theme that floating niggers swell.
Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days-
Nights turbid, vascular with silted shale
And roots surrendered down of moraine clays:
The Mississippi drinks the farthest dale.
O quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight!
The basalt surface drags a jungle grace
Ochreous and lynx-barred in lengthening might;
Patience! and you shall reach the biding place!
Over De Soto's bones the freighted floors
Throb past the City storied of three thrones.
Down two more turns the Mississippi pours
(Anon tall ironsides up from salt lagoons)
And flows within itself, heaps itself free.
All fades but one thin skyline 'round . . . Ahead
No embrace opens but the stinging sea;
The River lifts itself from its long bed,
Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow,
Tortured with history, its one will-flow!
-The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked and slow,
Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below.
THE DANCE
(from "The Bridge")
The swift red flesh, a winter king
Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?
She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;
She spouted arms; she rose with maize—to die.
And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands With mineral wariness found out the stone
Where prayers, forgotten, streamed the mesa sands? He holds the twilight's dim, perpetual throne.
Grey tepees tufting the blue knolls ahead,
Smoke swirling through the yellow chestnut glade. . . .
A distant cloud, a thunder-bud-it grew,
That blanket of the skies: the padded foot
Within, I hear it; 'til its rhythm drew,
-Siphoned the black pool from the heart's hot root!
A cyclone threshes in the turbine crest,
Swooping in eagle feathers down your back;
Know, Maquokeeta, greeting; know death's best;
-Fall, Sachem, strictly as the tamarack!
A birch kneels. All her whistling fingers fly.
The oak grove circles in a crash of leaves;
The long moan of a dance is in the sky.
Dance, Maquokeeta: Pocahontas grieves. . . .
And every tendon scurries toward the twangs
Of lightning deltaed down your saber hair.
Now snaps the flint in every tooth; red fangs
And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air. . . .
Dance, Maquokeeta! snake that lives before,
That casts his pelt, and lives beyond! Sprout, horn!
Spark, tooth! Medicine-man, relent, restore—
Lie to us-dance us back the tribal morn!
Spears and assemblies: black drums thrusting on-
O yelling battlements,-I, too, was liege
To rainbows currying each pulsant bone:
Surpassed the circumstance, danced out the siege!
And buzzard-circleted, screamed from the stake;
I could not pick the arrows from my side,
Wrapped in that fire, I saw more escorts wake-
Flickering, sprint up the hill, groins like a tide.
I heard the hush of lava wrestling your arms,
And stag teeth foam about the raven throat;
Flame cataracts of heaven in seething swarms
Fed down your anklets to the sunset's moat.
Oh, like the lizard in the furious noon,
That drops his legs and colors in the sun,
-And laughs, pure serpent, Time itself, and moon
Of his own fate, I saw thy change begun!
And saw thee dive to kiss that destiny
Like one white meteor. sacrosanct and blent
At last with all that's consummate and free
There, where the first and last gods keep thy tent.
Thewed of the levin, thunder-shod and lean,
Lo, through what infinite seasons dost thou gaze—
Across what bivouacs of thine angered slain,
And see'st thy bride immortal in the maize!
Totem and fire-gall, slumbering pyramid-
Though other calendars now stack the sky,
Thy freedom is her largesse, Prince, and hid
On paths thou knewest best to claim her by.
High unto Labrador the sun strikes free
Her speechless dream of snow, and stirred again,
She is the torrent and the singing tree;
And she is virgin to the last of men.
West, west and south! winds over Cumberland
And winds across the llano grass resume
Her hair's warm sibilance. Her breasts are fannedO stream by slope and vineyard-into bloom!
And when the caribou slant down for salt
Do arrows thirst and leap? Do antlers shine
Alert, star-triggered in the listening vault
Of dusk?—And are her perfect brows to thine?
We danced, O Brave, we danced beyond their farms,
In cobalt desert closures made our vows . . .
Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms,
The serpent with the eagle in the boughs.
POWER CAPE HATTERAS
(from "The Bridge")
The nasal whine of power whips a new universe
Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky,
Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house
Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs,
New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed
Of dynamos where hearing's leash is strummed ...
Power's script, wound, bobbin-bound, refined-
Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred
Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars.
Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder parts
Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling armatures,
As bright as frogs' eyes, giggling in the girth
Of steely gizzards-axle-bound, confined
In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee
The bearings glint-O murmurless and shined
In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy!
Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space. . . .
O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers!
There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk
Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;
Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestles veered
Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun
What ciphers risen from prophetic script,
What marathons new-set between the stars!
The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches
Already knows the closer clasp of Mars,-
New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place
To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!
Behold the dragon's covey-amphibian, ubiquitous
To hedge the seaboard, wrap the headland, ride
The blue's unfeathered districts unto aether. . .
While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised in pride
Hell's belt springs wider-into heaven's plumed side.
O bright circumferences, heights employed to fly
War's fiery kennel masked in downy offings,-
This tournament of space, the threshed and chiseled height,
Is baited by marauding circles, bludgeon flail
Of rancorous grenades whose screaming petals carve us
The wounds we wrap with theorems sharp as hail!
Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-silver hangars.
Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight;
Through sparkling visibility, outspread, unsleeping
Wings clip the last peripheries of light. . . .
Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol,
Each plane a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance,
Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover;
Surely no eye that Sunward Escadrille can cover!
There, meaningful, fledged as the Pleiades
With razor sheen they zoom each rapid helix!
Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding
They, cavalcade on escapade, shear Cumulus-
Lay siege and hurdle Cirrus down the skies!
While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger
Of pendulous auroral beaches,-satellited wide
By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee
On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide,
-Hast splintered space!
THE TUNNEL
(from "The Bridge")
To find the Western path
Right thro' the Gates of Wrath
Performances, assortments, résumés—
Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights
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