I Think I Could Turn Awhile Poem by Geoffrey Donald Page

1.
I think I could turn awhile and write like the Americans,
they are so at ease in their syllables, irregular as eyelids,
various as the sea.
They do not hear the iamb ticking, tetchy with its small demands.
Their pronouns are huger than Texas.
I too would find my metaphysics
as I sliced my sedan through a long prairie night.
The turkey sheds of Minnesota, the slanted dusk of Iowa,
the breakers on the Big Sur coast and the stillness in the Rockies
would each be a part of my redemption.
I too would be an heir of Whitman
despite all his curious shyness with women.
I¹d rummage through his catalogues, those holy repetitions,
hearing the King James Bible singing
through cirrus the size of all the eastern states
drifting by splendidly over my head.

2.
But somehow after
half a book
I know that I
would then turn back.
That rhetoric is
someone else's;
it works with very
different vowels.
I'd hear the clipped
iambics calling,
my template just
below the line.
I¹d feel the need for
tighter turns,
a tiredness with the
larger flourish,
their drumroll of a
flag unfurled.
‘That would be good,'
as Frost surmised,
‘both going and coming back',
back to something
leaner, drier,
back to something
lower-key:
the chicken sheds of
Wallabadah
a summer on the
Clarence maybe