An Exit From Utah

This is the place.

B. Young, 1847 

My knot, my clot, my Utah, 
Good gouty wrinkled nurse 
Turned dear disease, insufferable 
Sweet scurf, my bloat, my fever, 
You’re all the pain I am. 
And I’ll prescribe our health: 

Take roads, take all these pesky 
Limbs, wrenched or lopped off, 
Take valleys, our gawking wounds, 
And string them, stretch them, love, 
Splay them out here on the long 
Salt rack toward Nevada. 

The bleach, the healing eye 
That sears, the poisonous sweet 
Action of this wind will rinse 
Our oily blood, will conspire 
Against my kissing face 
To sting the light into me: 

At ninety miles an hour 
The blood’s old coils 
And convoluted pains of heart 
And head unwind, stretching 
Clean as chrome on the long 
Salt rack toward Nevada; 

Under me the quick engine, 
Steady like prayer, is purring 
To this vacancy of wind, the land 
Resolved to space and speed, 
“This is the place,” the slicing 
Light, the atomizing seas 
Of liquid sage, “This 
Is the place; this is the place.”