Great laughter rang out from all sides, and I wondered
what the mountain’s spirit could be thinking,
looked up overhead and saw jackpines in the moon,
saw ghosts of old miners, thought and thought about it.
In the dark eastern wall of the Divide
blew silence and the whisper of the wind tonight,
except in the ravine where we roared on and on;
and on the other side of the Divide
sprawled the Slope, the Great Western Slope, and the Plateau
that went to the springs, dropped, then led to the desert –
all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed
in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans
in the mighty land, on America’s rooftop.
And all that we could manage was to yell,
I guess – across the night, eastward over the plains,
upon which an old man with a mane of white hair
was making his way toward us with the Word
and would arrive before long and make us silent.
* * *
And so in America when the sun goes down
and I sit on the brokedown river pier
and watch the long, long skies pass over New Jersey
and sense all that raw land that rolls in one huge bulge
over to the West Coast, and all that road
going, all the people dreaming in its vastness…
and in Iowa I know by now the children
must be crying in the land where they let
the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out,
and didn’t Mother tell you that God is Pooh Bear?
…and the star of evening must be drooping
and shedding her sparkler dims across the prairie,
which is just before the coming of complete night
that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers,
that cups the peaks and that folds the final shore in,
and no one, nobody, nobody at all knows
what’ll happen to anybody else,
I think of Dean Moriarty. I even think
of Old Dean Moriarty the father
we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty.
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