This is another New Directions book
of mine called Starting from San Francisco.
Whitman started from Paumanok 100 years ago.
So we reached the last frontier and having no place to go,
I'm still trying to figure out where to go.
I'll come to that.
The title poem in this book is "Starting from San Francisco."
"Here I go again crossing the country in coach trains
back to my old lone wandering all night eastward, upward,
over the Great Divide and on, into Utah,
over Great Salt Plain and onward,
rocking the white dawn burst across mesas, tablelands, all
flat, all laid away.
Great glary sun, wood bridge over water.
Later in still light we still reel onward, onward?
Back and forth across the continent
bangbang by any wheel, or horse, any rail,
by car, by buggy, by stagecoach, walking, riding,
hooves pounding the Great Plains, caravans into the night
forever into Wyoming.
All that day and night rocking through it,
snow on steppes and plains of November, roads lost in it
or never existent, back in the beginning again, no people yet,
no ruts Westward yet under the snow.
Still more huge spaces we bowl through,
still untouched dark land indomitable.
Horizons of mesas like plains of Spain
high up in Don Quixote country, sharp eroded towers of bluffs
like windmills tilted, los molinos of Earth abandoned.
Great long rectangular stone islands
sticking up on the far plains like forts
or immense light cargo ships high
on planes of water, becalmed and rudderless,
props thrashing wheat, stranded forever
no one on those bridges.
Later again, much later one small halfass town,
followed by one telephone wire and 1 straight single iron
road hung to the tracks as by magnets attached
to a single endless fence past solitary pumping stations, each
with a tank, a car, a small house, a dog, no people
anywhere.
All hiding?
White men gone home?
Must be a cowboy someplace.
Birds flap from fences, trestles,
caw and caw their nothingness.
Stone church sticks up quote, 'out of 'nowhere,' unquote.
This must be interzone between heaven and Brooklyn.
Do they have a classified section as in the phonebooks
in the back of the Bibles here?
Otherwise they'd never find anything.
Try instant zen.
Still later again, sunset and strange clouds like udders
rayed with light from below, some God's hand sticks through,
black trees stand out.
The world is a winter farm, cradle we rocked out of,
prairie schooners into Pullmans, their bright saloons
sheeted in oblivion.
Wagonlits bedwagons over the prairies,
bodies nested in them, hurtled through night inscrutable.
Onward still or backward.
Huge snow fields still, on and on, still no one,
Indians all gone to Florida or Cuba.
Train hoots at something in the nowhere we still
rock through, ding-ding crossroads flicker by,
mining towns, once roaring, now shrunk to the railhead,
streetlights stoned with loneliness
or lit with leftover sun they drank too much
of during the day.
And at long last now this world shrunk to one
lone brakeman's space stuck out of
darkness-- long white forehead like bleached skull of cow,
huge black sad eyes, high-peaked cloth cap, gray-striped,
swings railroad lantern high, close up, as our window whizzes
by.
His figure splashed upon it, slanted, muezzin-like,
very grave, very tall, strange skeleton.
Who Stole America?
Myself I saw in the window reflected."
[APPLAUSE]
Did I hear a baby's cry at the end of that poem?
Probably one somewhere.