Alert
Discovering Americas inside
Himself he never knew were there, he felt
Apollo’s ranging thrust, Paul Bunyan’s stride
Across their western deserts’ sagebrush pelt,
Stepped out Atlantics and Pacifics, Lake
Superiors, stretched canyons wider than
The widest flow can ever carve. A snake
Commanches might have worshiped, or Cheyenne
Shamanic rituals could only start
To conjure, called up freedoms he could not
Have prophesied were lurking in the part
Of him that liberty had always sought.
..A tocsin sounded through male bones to urge
….His soles to bound up from the Rocky Mountains’ surge.