How old are we?
We are still a horse and buffalo people, heavy, lumbering cattle, with prairie and grain virtues, and our avarice is primitive wigwam barter; we ought to adore the great fish god, for we are a costal people, and New Mexico and Arizona, which are saurian undersea country, breeding pine, cactus, and snakes, are Galilean land.
We are passing from a morning horse innocence to unusual vices, and we are not ready.
Is Pike's Peak a hummock of old world sin, or the Rockies Scythian debauchery, or the mineraled Colorado dawn the Orient pearl? It is hay and brook and sweet pony corral, appled meadow garnished with odors more virtuous than spiced Eden.
Take no stock in American turpitudes; look to the Toltec of the Mayan for the lascivious parrot and monkey.
The Platte River, the pine, the sage brush are hardy character, but not history, and I admit that nothing has ever happened to me, and that I am mad for events.
Whatever we do is vast, unconscious geography; we are huge space giants of the mesa, surd, mad rivers that rush along, and we do not care to be near each other; this is not ancient wickedness, but solitary prairie grazing.
We cannot bear each other because we are immense territory, and our most malignant folly was to closet us up in cities, and take away our ocean past.
We should have the deepest reverence for poverty, because we are New Testament ground. Every day I offer a sacrifice to the extinct bison, the horse and savage Iroquois, who are our muse of cereal, yam and maize, and when somebody strokes my head, I walk to Mt. Shasta, or the Oregon orchards which are my epistles to the Cornithians.
Who is my Father?
The rising sun-man disappeared, and the step-father, the petticoat parent, is rearing the children since the tent, the wagon, and saddle have gone.
The great, grassy basin, the Catskill eagle made us tribal and fierce; the Pawnee, leading the sorrel of the Platte by a bull-hide rope, lessoned us in poverty, for want too is a tough, rude god make out of dried buffalo skin, to which we must offer our orisons, lest we perish of sloth and surfeit.
Our forefathers were giant volcano-horses; we were a hot earth animal as the elephant shaped mounds found in Kansas show.
Give us back our origins, for I am out of season in any other land, or plant except the corn seeds of Quetzalcoatl, the yucca, the cactus, and the Mojave joshua tree, dearer than the desert tamarisk beneath which Saul sat.
We have lost ground, city-cursed that we are, left it behind us like the Quiche did the Yaqui for whom they wept.
Return the Platte, the bison, the hoof-print of the deer, for I am as hungry for them as the wandering Quiche who had to smell the points of their staffs to deceive their empty stomachs.
Our Mother paps were rabid gulches in which the white and gray wolves howled, and now that the Toltecs and the Pawnee are dead, we are their evil genius, looking for a relic, a flint arrow, a teepee, a harness, a piece of bread.
I need confidence, the antelope, the pack-mule, the Indian apple, but we have killed the old bread gods made of plums, incense and the coca plant. Until we find the Quiche bread idol, we are orphans.
The word together has become a tabu devil; everything is public except guilt, which is hidden like hands that are pursed and pocketed lest they be demanded for hand-shaking, which is some uneasy, first sin; touch a man and blood goes out of his cheek; the mountains, the hills and the grass are turning against men, and every man dreads every man.
The mating season that once cattled the fingers of the marriageable now brings the alley tree, cemented in the side walk, and the tuberose poodle together. Aging men walk through the macadam auto ravines, until magnolia dusk, and then they go to their rooms, walking from faucet to window-hole. They crawl under a mealy blanket seeking that primeval night that came before creation, and fall at once into a water of sleep, void of vegetable, animal or root.
The highways have no ancestors; the 19th century American was kinless iron, and these men of the 20th are houseless sepcters because they have never claimed the continent. They have destroyed the old, rooty deities of the Cherokee and the Huron which are now howling in their dead, double-breasted coats and pants. The city auto man has killed everything, going through the unowned land without branch, leaf, trunk or earth. The autumn comes, and he has no foliage to shed, and the winter appears, and he cannot rest or sleep or die until April, and his destiny star, too, is dead. He has no green May shoots and no loam in which to sprout. He feeds listlessly and is alone when he genders with his wife. He is an unseeding, hating man who has forgotten to plant a street, a blue-bell, a house.
Prophecy, O lost people without a fate, is seeing the quick of the instant. You have no porch, no yard, no steps, you are groundless, and bitten by gnats because you have slain the earth. Can you die? Death is sweet and dear, for it is quiet. But there are no hills to appease you, and no mountains to give you hard, striving will, or rivers to wash your eyes to make them see.
Homeless, denatured ghost of many leafy races, where do you blow? who will gather you up?
GO BACK TO THE WET MEAT