Yvor Winters

Snake River Country I now remembered slowly how I came, I, sometime living, sometime with a name, Creeping by iron ways across the bare Wastes of Wyoming, turning in despair, Changing and turning, till the fall of night, Then throbbing motionless with iron might. Four days and nights! Small stations by the way, Sunk far past midnight! Nothing one can say Names the compassion they stir in the heart. Obscure men shift and cry, and we depart. And I remembered with the early sun That foul-mouthed barber back in Pendleton, The sprawling streets, the icy station bench, The Round-up pennants, the latrinal stench. These towns are cold by day, the flesh of vice Raw and decisive, and the will precise; At night the turbulence of drink and mud, Blue glare of gas, the dances dripping blood, Fists thudding murder in the shadowy air, Exhausted whores, sunk to a changeless stare. Alive in empty fact alone, extreme, They make each fact a mortuary dream. Once when the train paused in an empty place, I met the unmoved landscape face to face; Smoothing abysses that no stream could slake, Deep in its black gulch crept the heavy Snake, The sound diffused, and so intently firm, It seemed the silence, having change nor term. Beyond the river, gray volcanic stone In rolling hills: the river moved alone. And when we started, charged with mass, and slow, We hung against it in an awful flow. Thus I proceeded until early night, And, when I read the station’s name aright, Descended—at the bidding of a word! I slept the night out where the thought occurred, Then rose to view the dwelling where I lay. Outside, the bare land stretching far away; The frame house, new, fortuitous, and bright, Pointing the presence of the morning light; A train’s far screaming, clean as shining steel Planing the distance for the gliding heel. Through shrinking frost, autumnal grass uncurled, In naked sunlight, on a naked world.

I was the patriarch of the shining land, Of the blond summer and metallic grain; Men vanished at the motion of my hand, And when I beckoned they would come again. The earth grew dense with grain at my desire; The shade was deepened at the springs and streams; Moving in dust that clung like pillared fire, The gathering herds grew heavy in my dreams. Across the mountains, naked from the heights, Down to the valley broken settlers came, And in my houses feasted through the nights, Rebuilt their sinews and assumed a name. In my clear rivers my own men discerned The motive for the ruin and the crime— Gold heavier than earth, a wealth unearned, Loot, for two decades, from the heart of Time. Metal, intrinsic value, deep and dense, Preanimate, inimitable, still, Real, but an evil with no human sense, Dispersed the mind to concentrate the will. Grained by alchemic change, the human kind Turned from themselves to rivers and to rocks; With dynamite broke metal unrefined; Measured their moods by geologic shocks. With knives they dug the metal out of stone; Turned rivers back, for gold through ages piled, Drove knives to hearts, and faced the gold alone; Valley and river ruined and reviled; Reviled and ruined me, my servant slew, Strangled him from the figtree by my door. When they had done what fury bade them do, I was a cursing beggar, stripped and sore. What end impersonal, what breathless age, Incontinent of quiet and of years, What calm catastrophe will yet assuage This final drouth of penitential tears?

I, peregrine of noon.

Beyond the steady rock the steady sea, In movement more immovable than station, Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes, A slow obscure metonymy of motion, Crumbling the inner barriers of the brain. But the crossed rock braces the hills and makes A steady quiet of the steady music, Massive with peace. And listen, now: The foam receding down the sand silvers Between the grains, thin, pure as virgin words, Lending a sheen to Nothing, whispering.

To my daughter, 1954 This is the terminal: the light Gives perfect vision, false and hard; The metal glitters, deep and bright. Great planes are waiting in the yard— They are already in the night. And you are here beside me, small, Contained and fragile, and intent On things that I but half recall— Yet going whither you are bent. I am the past, and that is all. But you and I in part are one: The frightened brain, the nervous will, The knowledge of what must be done, The passion to acquire the skill To face that which you dare not shun. The rain of matter upon sense Destroys me momently. The score: There comes what will come. The expense Is what one thought, and something more— One’s being and intelligence. This is the terminal, the break. Beyond this point, on lines of air, You take the way that you must take; And I remain in light and stare— In light, and nothing else, awake.