“What is the east? Have you been in the east?”

the New Jersey woman asked the little girl

the wee child growing up in Arizona who said:

“Yes, I’ve been in the east,

the east is where trees come

between you and the sky.”

Another baby in Cleveland, Ohio,

in Cuyahoga County, Ohio—

why did she ask:

“Papa

what is the moon

supposed to advertise?”

And the boy in Winnetka, Illinois who wanted to know:

“Is there a train so long you can’t count the cars?

Is there a blackboard so long it will hold all the numbers?”

What of the Athenian last year on whose bosom

a committee hung a medal to say to the world

here is a champion heavyweight poet?

He stood on a two-masted schooner

and flung his medal far out on the sea bosom.

“And why not?

Has anybody ever given the ocean a medal?

Who of the poets equals the music of the sea?

And where is a symbol of the people

unless it is the sea?”

“Is it far to the next town?”

asked the Arkansas traveller

who was given the comfort:

“It seems farther than it is

but you’ll find it ain’t.”

Six feet six was Davy Tipton

and he had the proportions

as kingpin Mississippi River pilot

nearly filling the pilothouse

as he took the wheel with a laugh:

“Big rivers ought to have big men.”

On the homestretch of a racetrack

in the heart of the bluegrass country

in Lexington, Kentucky

they strewed the ashes of a man

who had so ordered in his will.

He loved horses

and wanted his dust

in the flying hoofs of the homestretch.

20

Who shall speak for the people?

Who knows the works from A to Z

so he can say, “I know what the

people want”? Who is this phenom?

where did he come from?

When have the people been half as rotten

as what the panderers to the people

dangle before crowds?

When has the fiber of the people been as

shoddy as what is sold to the people

by cheaters?

What is it the panderers and cheaters of

the people play with and trade on?

The credulity of believers and hopers—and

when is a heart less of a heart because

of belief and hope?

What is the tremulous line between credulity

on the one side and on the other

the hypotheses and illusions of inventors,

discoverers, navigators who chart

their course by what they hope and

believe is beyond the horizon?

What is a stratosphere fourteen miles from

the earth or a sunken glass house on

the sea-bottom amid fish and feather-

stars unless a bet that man can shove

on beyond yesterday’s record of man

the hoper, the believer?

How like a sublime sanctuary of human

credulity is that room where amid

tubes, globes and retorts they shoot

with heavy hearts of hydrogen and

batter with fire-streams of power

hoping to smash the atom:

Who are these bipeds trying to take apart