Going-to-the-Sun

by Vachel Lindsay

With shoulders hot with sunburn, with bodies rose and white,
And streaming curls like sunrise rays, or curls like flags of night,
Flowing to their dancing feet, circling them in storm,
And their adorers glory in each lean, Ionic form.
Oh, the hearts of women, then set free. They live the life of old
That chickadees and bobcats sing, the famous Age of Gold....
They sleep and star-gaze on the grass, their red-ore camp fires shine,
Like heaps of unset rubies spilled on velvet superfine.
And love of man and maid is when the granite weds the snow-white stream.
The ranch house bursts with babies. In the wood-lot deep eyes gleam,
Buffalo children, barking wolves, fuming cinnamon bears.
Human mustangs kick the paint from the breakfast-table chairs.”

And then I contradicted him, in a manner firm and flat.
“I have never heard, in the modest Hub, of a stock ill-bred as that.”
“So much the worse for Boston,” said the lecherous mountain-cat.

And the cat continued with the dream, as the snow blew round in drifts.
“The caves beneath the craggy sides of Boston hold tremendous gifts
For many youths that enter there, and lift up every stone that lifts.
They wander in, and wander on, finding all new things they can,
Some forms of jade or chrysoprase, more rare than radium for man.
And the burro trains, to fetch the loot, are jolly fool parades.
The burros flap their ears and bray, and take the steepest grades.
Or loaded with long mining-drills, and railroad rails, and boards for flumes,
Up Beacon Hill with fossil bats, swine bones from geologic tombs,
Or loaded with cliff-mummies of lost dwellers of the land.
Explorers’ yells and bridle bells sound above the sand.

“In the desert of my beauty-sleep, when rainflowers
Will not bloom,
In the Boston of my beauty-sleep, when storms
Will not bloom,

By Bunker Hill’s tall obelisk, till the August sun awakes,
I brood and stalk blue shadows, and my mad heart breaks.
Thoughts of a hunt unutterable ring the obelisk around.
And a thousand glorious sphinxes spring, singing, from the ground.
Very white young Salem witches ride them down the west.
The gravel makes a flat, lone track, the eye has endless rest.
Fair girls and beasts charge, dreaming, through the salt-sand white as snow,
Hunting the three-toed pony, while mysterious slaughters flow.
And the bat from the salt desert sucks the clouds on high
Until they fall in ashes, and all the sky is dry.
Oh, the empty Spanish Missions, where the bells ring without hand,
As we drive the shadowy dinosaurs and mammoths through the sand.”

And then I contradicted him, in a manner firm and flat.
“I have never seen, in the sun-kissed Hub, circuses like that.”
“So much the worse for you, my cub,” said the slant-eyed mountain-cat.

And the cat continued with his yarn, while I stood there marveling:—
“I here proclaim that I am not a vague, an abstract thing.
I like to eat the turkey-leg, the lamb, the chickenwing.
Yet the cat that knows not fasting, the cat that knows not dream,
That has not drunk dim mammoth-blood from the long-dead desert stream,
That has not rolled in the alkali-encrusted pits of bones
By the saber-toothed white tiger’s cave, where he kicked the ancient stones,
Has not known sacred Boston. Our gods are burning ore.
Our Colorado gods are the stars of heaven’s floor.
But the god of Massachusetts is a Tiger they adore.

“From that saber-tooth’s ghost-purring goes the whispered word of power
In the sunset, in the moonlight, in the purple sunrise hour:—
That an Indian chief is born, in a teepee, to the west,
That a school of rattlesnakes is rattling, on the mountain’s breast,
That an opal has been grubbed from the ground by a mole,
That a bumble-bee has found a new way to save his soul.
In Egyptian granite Boston, the rumor has gone round
That new ways to tame the whirlwind have been marvelously found.
That a Balanced Rock has fallen, that a battle has been won
In the soul of some young touch-me-not, some tigerish Emerson.”