New Collected Poems (22 page)

barefoot, on the warm boards. “McKinley!”

he said, and laid the field out clear

under McKinley's feet, and placed

the map of it in his head.

The first man who whistled

thought he had a wren in his mouth.

He went around all day

with his lips puckered,

afraid to swallow.

A man could be a god

if the ice wouldn't melt

and he could stand the cold.

Nothing is simple,

not even simplification.

Thus, throwing away

the mail, I exchange

the complexity of duty

for the simplicity of guilt.

Now that you have gone

and I am alone and quiet,

my contentment would be

complete, if I did not wish

you were here so I could say,

“How good it is, Tanya,

to be alone and quiet.”

Planting trees early in spring,

we make a place for birds to sing

in time to come. How do we know?

They are singing here now.

There is no other guarantee

that singing will ever be.

Even in a country you know by heart

it's hard to go the same way twice.

The life of the going changes.

The chances change and make a new way.

Any tree or stone or bird

can be the bud of a new direction. The

natural correction is to make intent

of accident. To get back before dark

is the art of going.

Seventeen seventy one

and two. In those years the fame

of the Long Hunters passed back

through the settlements, with news

of a rich and delightful country

to the west, on the waters of the Ohio.

My father and uncles held council

over their future prospects.

In the vigor of manhood and full

of enterprise, they longed to see

for themselves. They could not remain

confined in the sterile mountains

of Virginia, where only small parcels

of fertile land and could be found

at any one place. As soldiers

of the Indian Wars, each had

from the governor a grant

of four hundred acres, which had only

to be located and surveyed.

And so,

having first planted their corn

about the tenth of May

in the year 1773, they set out

to visit this land of promise,

five of them, taking along

Sam Adams, a neighbor's son,

nineteen years of age.

They sought their future homes,

their fortunes, and the honor

of being among the first

in that western wilderness.

They reached the Great Kanahway,

then known as New River,

about the middle of May.

Having sent back their horses,

they selected suitable trees,

felled them, hollowed the trunks,

and so made two canoes

to carry them and their baggage:

rifles, ammunition, tomahawks,

butcher knives, blankets,

fishing tackle, and gigs.

And then, after their rough

overland passage on horseback,

how lightly and quietly they passed

over the surface of the water,

their prows breaking the reflections

of the trees in the early morning.

They entered the Ohio on

the first of June, the opening

of light on that wide water,

its stillness and solitudes.

Opposite the mouth of the Scotia

they saw an old French town

of nineteen or twenty houses,

hewed logs and clapboard roofs,

vacant and deserted, small

and silent among the great trees.

On June thirteenth, a Sunday,

they were met by the bearer of a letter

“to the gentleman settlers”

from Richard Butler, a white man

who had lived at Chilicothe

with the Shawanoes several years:

“They claim an absolute rite

to all that country that you

are about to settle. It does not

lie in the power of those

who sold it to give this land.

Show a friendly countenance

to your present neighbors, the Shawanoes.

It lies in your power to have

good neighbors or bad, as they

are a people very capable

of discerning between good treatment

and ill. They expect you

to be friendly with them,

and to endeavor to restrain

the hunters from destroying the game.”

And this they took to show

the means by which an All-wise

Providence opened the way

for exploitation and settlement.

They camped on July fourth

at Big Bone Lick.

“It was a wonder to see

the large bones that lies there

which has been of several

large big creatures.”

They used the short joints

of the backbones for stools,

and the ribs for tent poles

to stretch their blankets on.

Here they met a Delaware

about seventy years old.

Did he know anything

about these bones? He replied

that when he was a boy “they

were just so as you now see them.”

And so they had come to a place

of mystery; they could not

enter except in awe.

At daylight on the morning

of July eighth, they reached

the mouth of the Kentucky River,

which they called the Lewvisa.

This was the foretold stream

that would carry them southward

into the heart of promise.

They set against its current,

reaching by nightfall the mouth

of a stream they called Eagle Creek

for the eagles they saw hovering

there, in the evening light.

And the next day went on

to the mouth of what is now

Drennon Creek, where the river

was nearly closed by a stone bar,

and there they left their boats.

They crossed a bottomland

through a forest of beech trees,

gray trunks in the shade

of gold-green foliage,

and after a mile came to

“a salt lick which was

a wonder to see—a mile

in length and one hundred yards

in breadth, & the roads that came

to that lick no man would believe

who did not see, & the woods

around that place were trod

for many miles, that there

was not as much food

as would feed one sheep.”

They encountered there great numbers

of buffalo, elk, deer,

beaver, wolves, and bears.

The commotion of the herds was astonishing,

their tramplings and outcries,

the flies and the dust. There

where the salts of the ground flowed

to the light, the living blood

of that country gathered, throve

in its seasonal pulse—such

a gathering of beasts as these men

had never seen. Through the nights

they heard them, dreamed them,

seeming to comprehend them

more clearly in dream

than in eyesight, for that upwelling

and abounding, unbidden by any

man, was powerful, bright,

and brief for men like these,

as a holy vision. Waking,

they could not keep it. They did not.

Five days and six

nights they camped there,

examining the lick, killing

game, making several

surveys of land. The uplands

around the lick they found

“very good, mostly

oak timber; a great many

small creeks and branches;

scarce as much water

among them all as would

save a man's life

while he traveled across them.”

One day, engaged in this work,

Uncle James and his neighbor's

son, Sam Adams, were passing

round the outskirts of the lick,

where had gathered a large herd

of the buffalo. The beasts

pressed together for the salt,

stomped, coughed, suckled

their calves, the dust rising

over their humps and horns,

their tails busy at flies.

They minded less than flies

the two men who moved

around them, thinking of other

lives, times to come.

And yet Sam Adams, boylike

perhaps, though he was nineteen

and a man in other ways,

would be diverted from his work

to gaze at the buffalo,

more numerous than all

his forefather's cattle, oblivious

abundance, there by no man's

will—godly, he might

have thought it, had he not

thought God a man.

And why

he shot into the herd

is a question he did not answer,

anyhow until afterwards,

if at all—if he asked at all.

He saw an amplitude

so far beyond his need

he could not imagine it,

and could not let it be.

He shot.

And the herd, unskilled

in fear of such a weapon

or such a creature, ran

in clumsy terror directly

toward the spot where the boy

and the man were standing.

Agile, the boy sprang

into a leaning mulberry.

Not so young, or active,

or so used to haste,

Uncle James took shelter

behind a young hickory

whose girth was barely larger

than his own.

Then it seemed

the earth itself rose,

gathered, fled past them.

The great fall of hooves shook

ground and tree. Leaves

trembled in the one sound.

Dust hid everything

from everything. Bodies

beat against each other

in heavy flight. Black horns