WEBVTT

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This is another
New Directions book

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of mine called Starting
from San Francisco.

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Whitman started from
Paumanok 100 years ago.

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So we reached the last frontier
and having no place to go,

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I'm still trying to
figure out where to go.

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I'll come to that.

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The title poem in this book is
"Starting from San Francisco."

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"Here I go again crossing
the country in coach trains

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back to my old lone wandering
all night eastward, upward,

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over the Great Divide
and on, into Utah,

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over Great Salt
Plain and onward,

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rocking the white dawn burst
across mesas, tablelands, all

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flat, all laid away.

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Great glary sun, wood
bridge over water.

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Later in still light we
still reel onward, onward?

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Back and forth
across the continent

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bangbang by any wheel,
or horse, any rail,

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by car, by buggy, by
stagecoach, walking, riding,

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hooves pounding the Great
Plains, caravans into the night

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forever into Wyoming.

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All that day and night
rocking through it,

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snow on steppes and plains
of November, roads lost in it

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or never existent, back in the
beginning again, no people yet,

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no ruts Westward
yet under the snow.

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Still more huge spaces
we bowl through,

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still untouched dark
land indomitable.

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Horizons of mesas
like plains of Spain

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high up in Don Quixote country,
sharp eroded towers of bluffs

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like windmills tilted, los
molinos of Earth abandoned.

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Great long rectangular
stone islands

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sticking up on the
far plains like forts

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or immense light
cargo ships high

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on planes of water,
becalmed and rudderless,

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props thrashing wheat,
stranded forever

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no one on those bridges.

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Later again, much later
one small halfass town,

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followed by one telephone wire
and 1 straight single iron

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road hung to the tracks
as by magnets attached

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to a single endless fence past
solitary pumping stations, each

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with a tank, a car, a small
house, a dog, no people

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anywhere.

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All hiding?

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White men gone home?

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Must be a cowboy someplace.

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Birds flap from
fences, trestles,

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caw and caw their nothingness.

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Stone church sticks up quote,
'out of 'nowhere,' unquote.

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This must be interzone
between heaven and Brooklyn.

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Do they have a classified
section as in the phonebooks

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in the back of the Bibles here?

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Otherwise they'd
never find anything.

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Try instant zen.

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Still later again, sunset and
strange clouds like udders

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rayed with light from below,
some God's hand sticks through,

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black trees stand out.

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The world is a winter farm,
cradle we rocked out of,

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prairie schooners into
Pullmans, their bright saloons

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sheeted in oblivion.

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Wagonlits bedwagons
over the prairies,

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bodies nested in them, hurtled
through night inscrutable.

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Onward still or backward.

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Huge snow fields still,
on and on, still no one,

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Indians all gone
to Florida or Cuba.

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Train hoots at something
in the nowhere we still

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rock through, ding-ding
crossroads flicker by,

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mining towns, once roaring,
now shrunk to the railhead,

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streetlights stoned
with loneliness

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or lit with leftover
sun they drank too much

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of during the day.

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And at long last now
this world shrunk to one

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lone brakeman's
space stuck out of

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darkness-- long white forehead
like bleached skull of cow,

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huge black sad eyes, high-peaked
cloth cap, gray-striped,

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swings railroad lantern high,
close up, as our window whizzes

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by.

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His figure splashed upon
it, slanted, muezzin-like,

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very grave, very tall,
strange skeleton.

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Who Stole America?

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Myself I saw in the
window reflected."

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[APPLAUSE]

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Did I hear a baby's cry
at the end of that poem?

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Probably one somewhere.

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