The Oregon Canto

"What this old geezer has endured for us
I can't imagine; sunny Italy all that time, and him
wading that River Styx in his brain: could you
write a poem for fifty years?" Not I, but then
I'm only another clerking man
knocking out statistics on earnest youth
year in, year out, another kind of work. So,
occasionally, between a Friday and a Monday,
because they've let us out of school, we drones
scatter across the landscape, picking up stones
and spotting them across smooth water, or
stumping up steep paths beneath dark firs,
hoping to glimpse something or other
from an abandoned fireman's hut. We talk
of Ezra Pound, or metaphysical stuff: does
God have an anus? or: see the black bark
on the older trees here on the south side?
Fire ran up to the crest and died out,
because heat rises, and the north slope
is always dripping wet. Odysseus never slept here; or
if he did, then Circe would never have made pigs.
Bears she would make, and not stop with his men:
behold her masterwork, the Odysseus Bear,
wily, mean, rolling logs, tearing up salmonberry patches,
going berserk amid devil's club, leaving
huckleberry pies all over roads and trails. So if
Telemakos worried his men down to the ship,
and bent their strong backs to his purpose
over the wine-dark seas and foam, reading
the skies and the deep, only to hear, this time,
from Menelaus, and that woman, nothing of import--
would he not, a hero and son of a hero,
range onward then, reach out with his mind and eye,
and take in the inland sea at a single pass,
wearing out wood and men beneath him? At length
when no sign appeared, he would set axe to the world's tree,
and build of it a thing wonderful, deep-keeled,
tight-clinkered, with a thousand stories writhing in its sail:
and rest not till he had found out all the lands,
their sorceresses, their pig-men, their island kings,
and their dark-eyed daughters of island kings. Last
would he come to Oregon to speak to the Siuslaws in their
tongue, saying: I seek a mighty man, a man of vision, a man
who speaks in silver and gold, whose hand
raised grapes and a people from a stony soil,
who built a wooden beast with which
he threw down towers of stone and a sad old man.
They might regard him then as one like themselves,
rememberers of Coyote, that madcap, always
one step ahead, making the world for a joke.
One would lead him to Grass Mountain then,
and show him the huckleberry pies. Good luck:
he's been here twenty years, scratching his back on the trees--
if that guy wants to go home to his wife
you're welcome to him, but we always thought
he was more our kind. Why don't you just
come on down to the village with us
and bake some clams? And then Telemakos
would have to think mighty hard to recall his purpose
amid so many shades of green.