Toward the Gulf | Page 4

back of our word!

The falls of St. Anthony tumble the waters?In laughter and tumult and roaring of voices!?And the river moves in its winding channel toward the gulf, Over the breast of De Soto,?By the swamp grave of La Salle!?The old days sleep, the lion of Tennessee sleeps?With Daniel Boone and the hunters,?The rifle men, the revelers,?The laughers and dancers and choppers?Who climbed the crests of the Alleghenies,?And poured themselves into Tennessee, Ohio,?Kentucky, Illinois, the bountiful West.?But the river never sleeps, the river flows forever,?Making land forever, reclaiming the wastes of the sea.?And the race never sleeps, the race moves on forever.?And wars must come, as the waters must sweep away?Drift-wood, dead wood, choking the strength of the river--?For Liberty never sleeps!

The lion of Tennessee sleeps!?And over the graves of the hunters and choppers?The tramp of troops is heard!?There is war again,?O, Father of Waters!?There is war, O, symbol of freedom!?They have chained your giant strength for the cause?Of trade in men.?But a man of the West, a denizen of your shore,?Wholly American,?Compact, clear-eyed, nerved like a hunter,?Who knew no faster beat of the heart,?Except in charity, forgiveness, peace;?Generous, plain, democratic,?Scarcely appraising himself at full,?A spiritual rifleman and chopper,?Of the breed of Daniel Boone--?This man, your child, O, Father of Waters,?Waked from the winter sleep of a useless day?By the rising sun of a Freedom bright and strong,?Slipped like the loosened snows of your mountain streams?Into a channel of fate as sure as your own--?A fate which said: till the thing be done?Turn not back nor stop.?Ulysses of the great Atlantis,?Wholly American,?Patient, silent, tireless, watchful, undismayed?Grant at Fort Donelson, Grant at Vicksburg,?Leading the sons of choppers and riflemen,?Pushing on as the hunters and farmers?Poured from the mountains into the West,?Freed you, Father of Waters,?To flow to the Gulf and be one?With the earth-engirdled tides of time.?And gave us states made ready for the hands?Wholly American:?Hunters, choppers, tillers, fighters?For epochs vast and new?In Truth, in Liberty,?Posters from land to land and sea to sea?Till all the earth be free!

Ulysses of the great Atlantis,?Dream not of disaster,?Sleep the sleep of the brave?In your couch afar from the Father of Waters!?A new Ulysses arises,?Who turns not back, nor stops?Till the thing is done.?He cuts with one stroke of the sword?The stubborn neck that keeps the Gulf?And the Caribbean?From the luring Pacific.?Roosevelt the hunter, the pioneer,?Wholly American,?Winner of greater wests?Till all the earth be free!

And forever as long as the river flows toward the Gulf?Ulysses reincarnate shall come?To guard our places of sleep,?Till East and West shall be one in the west of heaven and earth!

In an old print?I see a thicket of masts on the river.?But in the prints to be?There will be lake boats,?With port holes, funnels, rows of decks,?Huddled like swans by the docks,?Under the shadows of cliffs of brick.?And who will know from the prints to be,?When the Albatross and the Golden Eagle,?The flying craft which shall carry the vision?Of impatient lovers wounded by Spring?To the shaded rivers of Michigan,?That it was the Missouri, the Iowa,?And the City of Benton Harbor?Which lay huddled like swans by the docks?
You are not Lake Leman,?Walled in by Mt. Blanc.?One sees the whole world round you,?And beyond you, Lake Michigan.?And when the melodious winds of March?Wrinkle you and drive on the shore?The serpent rifts of sand and snow,?And sway the giant limbs of oaks,?Longing to bud,?The boats put forth for the ports that began to stir,?With the creak of reels unwinding the nets,?And the ring of the caulking wedge.?But in the June days--?The Alabama ploughs through liquid tons?Of sapphire waves.?She sinks from hills to valleys of water,?And rises again,?Like a swimming gull!?I wish a hundred years to come, and forever?All lovers could know the rapture?Of the lake boats sailing the first Spring days?To coverts of hepatica,?With the whole world sphering round you,?And the whole of the sky beyond you.
I knew the captain of the City of Grand Rapids.?He had sailed the seas as a boy.?And he stood on deck against the railing?Puffing a cigar,?Showing in his eyes the cinema flash of the sun on the waves. It was June and life was easy. ...?One could lie on deck and sleep,?Or sit in the sun and dream.?People were walking the decks and talking,?Children were singing.?And down on the purser's deck?A man was dancing by himself,?Whirling around like a dervish.?And this captain said to me:?"No life is better than this.?I could live forever,?And do nothing but run this boat?From the dock at Chicago to the dock at Holland?And back again."
One time I went to Grand Haven?On the Alabama with Charley Shippey.?It was dawn, but white dawn only,?Under the reign of Leucothea,?As we volplaned, so it seemed, from the lake?Past the lighthouse into the river.?And afterward laughing and talking?Hurried to Van Dreezer's restaurant?For breakfast.?(Charley knew him and