Harper's Ferry Floating Away: A Poem of Recognition

I WAS riding on the B & O,
Great Cacapon to Sir John’s Run,
A hundred miles from Washington,
I dozed,
I dozed by Sleepy Creek
And Cherry Run and Blairton . . .

I dozed a rhyme:
I’d like to know
If light from the great star Fomalhaut
Is shining on Joe Aleck’s place
Way out in Frannie,Wyoming . . .
The goldenrod brings Fomalhaut
And old Joe Aleck used to cook
For Grover Cleveland long ago ...

I said and stopped the rhyme,
And the lounge car ticked the rails so slow
I thought the car was sliding back
And ingots of the moonlight slid
Along the other track.

A magazine lay open on my lap
And I said to an air-conditioned Congo porter:
‘Please let me know when we come to Harper’s Ferry.’

A meadow stitched with stubble scudded past,
I dozed the starlight down Joe Aleck’s place,
The swing-glint of it over the Big Horn Mountains,
The swing-glint, of it over the Absarokas;
I thought of Grandpa telling how old John Brown
Would hook one leg across the hominy block
And preach the birds off every tree in Kansas.

Harper’s Ferry,
Harper’s Ferry,
Me here,
Me here,
Almost Harper’s Ferry, Old John Brown about to stop the train,
Old John Brown about to free the slaves . . .

I read a folder to pass the time,
The folder made me make a rhyme:

The midnight B & 0 came in,
It whistled from the West ,
Conductor Phelps he stopped the train,
A rifle at his breast;
The porter was the first to die,
They didn’t understand
The reason why he tried to cross
The bridge to Maryland. . .

Swing low, sweet chariot ,
Talcin’ Mister Hayward home .. .

The train rolled on about the time it takes
To wonder if the trout in the Beartooth Mountains
Strike or reject the ancient grasshoppers
That thaw as good as new from Grasshopper Glacier.

I opened my eyes,
I looked at the magazine,
A girl in the magazine crossed her legs at me
To try to make me buy a cigarette;
I saw the porter coming down the aisle:
Harper’s Ferry,
Almost Harper’s Ferry . . .

‘Sorry, we jus’ gone by,’ the porter said.
‘Ah thought you woke up when ah pulled yo’ coat.’
‘Sorry,’ he said,
‘Sorry,’ like an amendment,
Grasshoppers floating away,
Harper’s Ferry
Floating
Floating
Away . . .

‘Sorry? Why should he be?’ said the magazine,
‘No class of workers in America
Is worse exploited than the Pullman porters!’

‘But he really was,’ I said. ‘It was my fault
For dozing off . . . ‘
And the magazine exclaimed:
‘You’d have the porter hollering hallelujah
Each time the whistle toots for Harper’s Ferry?’

‘Only,’ I said, ‘when you’re in the thick of it,
And I mean you and not the porter now,
History implies a recognition . . . ‘

‘Recognition of what?’ said the magazine.

‘ Whatever gives you access to yourself,
Whatever gives you yesterday tomorrow,
Whatever . . .’
‘Nonsense!’ said the magazine.

‘There’s love in it,’ I said . . . ‘the land, the living,
And sometimes what your senses try to tell you
To keep the dead you want to live from dying:
John Brown’s gone unless I want to keep him.’

‘The dead are dead!’ observed the magazine.

I said: ‘It’s only chance it’s Harper’s Ferry.
Another day . . .
Kaskaskia or Sundance,
It might be Sitting Bull or Coronado,
It might be climbing a maple to whittle a whistle.’

I thought of the taste of maple bark at the top
Of the tree on the Fourth of July,
Dick hollering up:

‘Johnson just licked Jeffries!’

Old Dick dead:

Killing himself on the Coast and nothing working
In his poor dead skull any more if you stood on his grave
And tried to ask him:
Who was Ethan Allen?

If you tried to ask him:
Who was Stephen Foster?
Can you play Susanna on your mouth-harp, Dick?
Dick, did you ever hear of old John Brown?
What’s it like, Dick, smelling the Gunnison meadows?

The smell of gas lights in the Baptist Church?
And Nearer My God to Thee and mother saying:
‘They played that at McKinley’s funeral’?

‘You’re very silly,’ said the magazine.

I looked far back as I could up the Shenandoah,
These deep subaltern shadows of my land,
My people suffering,
My people shining,
Angels whispering to old John Brown,
Angels fingering his eye-sockets . . .

The magazine kept talking, talking, talking:

There’s nothing to this recognition nonsense,
The world is real and we are up against it,
My difficulty here at Harper’s Ferry
Was one of simple ideology:
The John Brown thing was purely economic,
My old friend Dick, that’s why he killed himself,
The economic cards were stacked against him.

I pressed my face on the windowpane of the valley,
The trees, the hills, the railroad tracks, the river,
The outer night so certain and unmoved
By wistful therapies men dream for men . . .

Answer me! Answer me! O strange Potomac!

I could imagine forbears back to Adam,
Archers, sailors, wanderers, herdsmen people,
And all their various troubled circumstance,
Not willfully to put me in this lounge car,
Not asking me to pay them any debt,
But putting me here . . .
The plasm of their passion,
Their very valent continuity,
The lover gasping now to the other lover,
The sexton saying now to the boy with a spade:

All Nature saying nothing till we ask it,
Like me here now to ask a shagbark tree
Some invoicing of John Brown’s clotted hair,
The scything of the heart,
The tedded blood,
The long long voice a prisoner about to be
The earth of earth again
Gives any wood lot.