☀ Today's Poem: "知 / Know" Paisley Rekdal

                                 Frederick Jackson Turner, lecture to the
                                 American Historical Association, 1893

Come waves of men with capital; come broadcloths,
            silks, leghorns, crapes, all the refinements

the train ushers into each village, and the settler
            revolts, pushes into the interior, flees

what's turned to edifices of brick, orchards, gardens,
            colleges, churches: rolls instead

westward into the frontier's crucible in which
            all former servants of Europe

become American. Without the war cry
            of Cheyenne and Iroquois,

would we be ourselves? Would we have battled,
            consolidated, traded, made self

and liberty our germs of government?
            Would we have stayed

and called home the lands of the upper Yadkin
            had they remained untamed

by farm and corncrib, their timbers not made
            girdled, deadened, fenced?

The West is too much
            for any man. It takes him

from board room and steam engine and loses him
            to birch bark canoe. We see a mountain

and level it; we see a plain
            spread out like a meadow

to overrun: nature the fault and fall line
            we trace to our next

destination, following the arteries
            of our nation's geology: lost shores

of inland seas, shale scarps and carapaces
            carved from eastern Kentucky.

All now replaced by these joins and joints
            of an iron nervous system.

Again and again, we return to the primitive
            line which we alone believe

marks progress; history does not move only forward
            for the American, but back. The settler

will not settle his desires, and so the soul
            of our country stays restless, nervous, intolerant

of administrative experience and education; hews
            to the press of private liberty, which knows

no bounds, gives few benefits, risks
            government laxity and a spoils system.

We are Boone. We are Kit Carson. Hunter, trader, occupant
            of the moment. We are the land

we can't forget once thrived without us. This
            is America, at the end

of a hundred years of life
            under the Constitution.

The train is here. Our frontier is gone.