I
Sublette moved up the Cimarron alert
all day for hostiles; he feared what he was finding:
no one had reported this place; once you made
camp it was time to move-it soon felt old.
He had always been the kind of man who had
the kind of horses that would turn
to look at you. In talk he listened to the current,
not the words. Now he heard something in the country.
Maybe he had listened too long.
His friends had scattered, far valleys, not anywhere
the right place-how could it be?-or the wrong either:
scatter. But for him the earth had lent itself, was
always his. Steady now, he still did not start any bluff moves:
what would happen was what he would intend, though the world
would swerve sometime, and his hand would miss the handle.
By his campfire, his own tea—warm or cool-was what he would
deserye. He carried an extra cup.
II
But he was lost a new way that winter, began to find
tracks he could read better and better, till all
he found went out and intensified the valley:
he came around the Cimarron breaks into a land that
began to tense itself all day for deliberate snow.
He camped there well but was afraid: once that place
was found, the West had come; no one could undiscover it.
Like a badger by that stream-so strong the trap that
grabbed his foot was bent, with his teeth grooved on anything
he bit, and miles ringed all around, so target-like the place,
where—now—the sky kept saying out and out because
its color would never be at all but what it was—he took
his paw back from the steel, and watched the trap.
III
The river stopped, for him; the clouds were holding
there: Sublette’s big valley crossed by trails that
surfaced, under a round reminder of gold or copper sun,
shimmered toward him. He looked across a place the air
filled-saved only by his weakness, forms of monotony,
meanings
that made the world regular enough to offer choices.
He had not stopped until the West climbed in at him
but now it was the last available ranch, a place that still says:
You never told a friend, even, a lie. You
never tried for the good feeling you get from over-valuing
something that’s yours—indulgence that seems austere.
It is not. You were the one who always began on the level part,
forth on a line trued for accepted real things,
looking across the prairies a rod of steady light.
Held where the sky touched land along the edge,
his trail encountered all his eye grooved, and went on.
Reluctant hero, he had let one deed at a time take him;
then where he was, was everywhere: the kind of trip he
took turned into carving; the knifeblade led, the hand
reluctant but so steady it was always at the place
it should be and with force as if the earth turned
for his body and the light held back until his eyes
met it, all equal, all come right at once.
His fate was righteousness.
IV
That was his land, but no one there to know. By
following him we blunder into it. Here now, fall or winter,
any time, it’s here. You move your hand across
till the fingers frame a certain line trees make by the
river always there: that’s the way the man Sublette became.
Reluctantly he found and kept on finding himself the man
the land meant. It subsided and became a state.
Now snow terms are imposed for us; the wind ululates
around the barn. Eyes level-rafter, higher, window
defense above the storm–we climb, years of soft dust
molded—rafter, stanchions, haymow. No one can sound
the deep rope to those days, hold level the wide ranch
that swung in his life in his mind, Sublette’s held level
way, no undeserved lunge in his kind of gaze.
What he kept may fit a box put carelessly away,
but he heard some string that sang the wilderness,
monuments that pledge the rock they come from,
statues that regret their edge–and it all goes on.
Surveillance-his assignment-brings him back to us;
our work is to forget in time what if remembered might block
that great requirement which waits on its wide wings: the
wilderness. That man–fugitive from speed, antagonist of
greatness
comes here quietly like this to tell us what exploring means.
Leave a Reply