Yankee Boy Poem by Robert Rorabeck

These valleys are all the same,
And the path through them linear,
But men still get lost even a mile from
The train-
When I have come down from the high
Basins, and the water is singing in the glowering cleft,
And I have summited two Siamese mountains,
Clutched between Silverton and Durango
And still have time to bight my lip:
What I have done is not the average tourism,
To scramble like a philosophical ram above tree line,
Following the cairns of leather tramps,
Over where the voices of the trees worry
Of the lightning,
Where even the air is minimal, and the people
Very rare, but haggard, crippled,
And mostly indomitable- my friends;
I have followed the rim from Windom to
Sunshine,
Eating granola and smacking sweet farts that
Tang bumblebees,
And around the glacial lakes of wet nurses,
Where there is neither echo nor ripple,
And the water is newly transformed and curious,
Where college students yet evolving make love,
And peal the gear off each other like cicadas molting;
And then roll like angels amidst the dirty white
Coats of the mountain goats and their harems;
When the time before I got lost on Jupiter,
Following the wrong lines,
And went down early though reaching her throat, because I feared
That serrated goddesses of many ridges and shortcomings,
The false ways she could take me after beckoning,
And I felt her watching me dissatisfied as I fled like
The runoff of melting snows
Down her bosom and into the great table of stunted juniper
And bear dung, and the nourishment of mud slicked down from her chin;
But on this trip I succeeded in her eyes inside me:
The whys of my gazelle-legs leaping the class three
Rocks, grinning up as if in ancient worship,
As the sun removes a mimic of my soul;
There at the top she is open bossomed and expansive,
Unmined and yet elusive franchise, the lazy politicians
Have yet though to elicit,
Where the sons who work long days for their fathers
Can open up new furtive lots with epiphany,
And her tricks are pure and tangled like a disarrayed festival
Of permanence and unbearable truths,
And I can almost see all the way to where she lives,
Neither aware or turned to me in unrecognizable appreciations;
But I have done it for her,
And the way down is beautiful even in the dark and the
Herding weathers- I am the only one of my company
To see her face lucid and immortal in the falling light.
When I left her I did not go all the way,
For I keep her still though she doesn’t know,
For she doesn’t even suspect me
Where her dreamless head rises above the hardpan plateaus
And the nocturnal city’s airy lamps. At the trailhead,
I gave the lost man water and showed him the way
Back to the train where my aunt was waiting
And impressed.