# John Brown's Body (1928)/Invocation

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INVOCATION
INVOCATION
American muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land,
As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers, Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows, As native as the shape of Navajo quivers, And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.
Swift runner, never captured or subdued, Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream, That half a hundred hunters have pursued But never matched their bullets with the dream,
Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.
You are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost With dollar-silver in your saddle-horn, The cowboys riding in from Painted Post, The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,
And you are the clipped velvet of the lawns Where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods, The grey Maine rocks—and the war-painted dawns That break above the Garden of the Gods.
The prairie-schooners crawling towards the ore And the cheap car, parked by the station-door. ​Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumes Of stranded smoke out of a stony mouth You are that high stone and its arrogant fumes, And you are ruined gardens in the South
And bleak New England farms, so winter-white Even their roofs look lonely, and the deep The middle grainland where the wind of night Is like all blind earth sighing in her sleep.
A friend, an enemy, a sacred hag With two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.
They tried to fit you with an English song And clip your speech into the English tale. But, even from the first, the words went wrong, The catbird pecked away the nightingale.
The homesick men begot high-cheekboned things Whose wit was whittled with a different sound And Thames and all the rivers of the kings Ran into Mississippi and were drowned.
They planted England with a stubborn trust. But the cleft dust was never English dust.
Stepchild of every exile from content And all the disavouched, hard-bitten pack Shipped overseas to steal a continent With neither shirts nor honor to their back.
Pimping grandee and rump-faced regicide, Apple-cheeked younkers from a windmill-square, Puritans stubborn as the nails of Pride, Rakes from Versailles and thieves from County Clare,
The black-robed priests who broke their hearts in vain To make you God and France or God and Spain. ​These were your lovers in your buckskin-youth. And each one married with a dream so proud He never knew it could not be the truth And that he coupled with a girl of cloud.
And now to see you is more difficult yet Except as an immensity of wheel Made up of wheels, oiled with inhuman sweat And glittering with the heat of ladled steel.
All these you are, and each is partly you, And none is false, and none is wholly true.
So how to see you as you really are, So how to suck the pure, distillate, stored Essence of essence from the hidden star And make it pierce like a riposting sword.
For, as we hunt you down, you must escape And we pursue a shadow of our own That can be caught in a magician's cape But has the flatness of a painted stone.
Never the running stag, the gull at wing, The pure elixir, the American thing.
And yet, at moments when the mind was hot With something fierier than joy or grief, When each known spot was an eternal spot And every leaf was an immortal leaf,
I think that I have seen you, not as one, But clad in diverse semblances and powers, Always the same, as light falls from the sun, And always different, as the differing hours.
Yet, through each altered garment that you wore, The naked body, shaking the heart's core. ​All day the snow fell on that Eastern town With its soft, pelting, little, endless sigh Of infinite flakes that brought the tall sky down Till I could put my hands in the white sky
And taste cold scraps of heaven on my tongue And walk in such a changed and luminous light As gods inhabit when the gods are young. All day it fell. And when the gathered night
Was a blue shadow cast by a pale glow I saw you then, snow-image, bird of the snow.
And I have seen and heard you in the dry Close-huddled furnace of the city street When the parched moon was planted in the sky And the limp air hung dead against the heat.
I saw you rise, red as that rusty plant, Dizzied with lights, half-mad with senseless sound, Enormous metal, shaking to the chant Of a triphammer striking iron ground.
Enormous power, ugly to the fool, And beautiful as a well-handled tool.
These, and the memory of that windy day On the bare hills, beyond the last barbed wire, When all the orange poppies bloomed one way As if a breath would blow them into fire,
I keep forever, like the sea-lion's tusk The broken sailor brings away to land, But when he touches it, he smells the musk, And the whole sea lies hollow in his hand.
So, from a hundred visions, I make one, And out of darkness build my mocking sun.
And should that task seem fruitless in the eyes Of those a different magic sets apart To see through the ice-crystal of the wise No nation but the nation that is Art,
Their words are just. But when the birchbark-call Is shaken with the sound that hunters make The moose comes plunging through the forest-wall Although the rifle waits beside the lake.
Art has no nations—but the mortal sky Lingers like gold in immortality.
This flesh was seeded from no foreign grain But Pennsylvania and Kentucky wheat, And it has soaked in California rain And five years tempered in New England sleet
To strive at last, against an alien proof And by the changes of an alien moon, To build again that blue, American roof Over a half-forgotten battle-tune
And call unsurely, from a haunted ground, Armies of shadows and the shadow-sound.
In your Long House there is an attic-place Full of dead epics and machines that rust, And there, occasionally, with casual face, You come awhile to stir the sleepy dust;
Neither in pride nor mercy, but in vast Indifference at so many gifts unsought, The yellowed satins, smelling of the past, And all the loot the lucky pirates brought.
I only bring a cup of silver air, Yet, in your casualness, receive it there.
Receive the words that should have walked as bold As the storm walks along the mountain-crest And are like beggars whining in the cold.
The maimed presumption, the unskilful skill, The patchwork colors, fading from the first, And all the fire that fretted at the will With such a barren ecstasy of thirst.
Receive them all—and should you choose to touch them With one slant ray of quick, American fight, Even the dust will have no power to smutch them, Even the worst will glitter in the night.
If not—the dry bones littered by the way May still point giants toward their golden prey.