catapult magazine

American Icon

by David Howard Malone

He sees the smoke rising against the colorless winter sky,
faint and smudged, like a pencil mark indifferently erased,
and he feels it again, the never-ending encroachment,
a new band of settlers closing in, stealing away his frontier,
crowding him with their cookfires and regulations.

He walks in and out of the cabin carrying blankets, his axe,
cookpots, efficient in his fury, cinching packs on the horse
and mule , as he’d done when he left his mother years ago
and too many women to count in the time that’s passed since,
their angry or tearful words  unable to cage him;

some of them clutching his arms, still seeking to bend him
to their ways, as though a woman were a lantern that could
contain the fire of a man’s spirit, not seeing that his spirit was already
miles ahead, burning a trail into the unknown, confident
his body would shake itself free and brand reality with his dreams.

He lugs bushels of potatoes and turnips out of the root cellar
and dumps them in the snow, scatters his remaining supply
of meal and white flour. No wanderer through the woods will
grow fat on his toil — better to freeze or rot than find its way
to a neighbor’s belly. He lights a lamp, thinking ahead to the desert,

clean and uncluttered as picked bone, its brilliant heat
incinerating intruders; he sees himself riding for days,
encountering no other soul, alone in an earthly paradise.
He tosses the lamp through the cabin door and by the time
the flame begins to sway on the floor, he’s mounted and heading west.