Toward The American West Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

'not the cushion and the slipper'
Pioneers, O Pioneers, Walt Whitman

they always lived filling in the blanks others left alone
breaking from the ranks and from the dream of home, derelict.
mad for treasure, ill fated expeditions;

never doubling back
their hands sifting stardust,
the twilights of violet

and skeletal lack.
I heard them I saw them
I knew they were out there

past Quixote's mills

and in my stillness, gathered my scant will
in my own time to lag behind them;
the diamond dust they had become scattering

in trackless trails, the vanishing point of rails or
in the canyons where one Echo lives
or Georgia O Keefe painting their desert reefs
that sieved the soul: in the one realization:

'you are never going back...'
you are never going home...

then clues dropped like souvenirs into the plum darkness
and no Christmas where I stooped down and wept
all blue forget me not and laurel

perhaps one lone message back east sent:
the children have all died of fevers
and the infant cherubs buried

give us at least a tattered peace

the crops burned or beset by locusts
and then no word at all
the messengers slept the dream they deemed worth more
than anything even when falling as they did
that's how it seemed, of freedom, of land wrested
from the Angel of death

from a bent wagon skittered horse under the last, vast witnessing
of American stars and the night birds trilling;
as though it were apple green Spring...a late love prefiguring'

with the horses' gait stumbling into delirium
into the ravine unforseen the dry gulch withering
where sudden angels gleaned them.

as the snow flies, over the long, long plains
I infer their songs, their last remains
I feel it always winter-wise, the tallowless
heralding; their demise so compassless

and there, near the scrub pines
painted indigo-lamentable, shadowed magenta
my grieved Star, your moody Western star, o Whitman

always, also I will.

mary angela douglas 11 december 2018; rev.18 january 2019; 27 september 2023