To Fall into Gallop

Bangor, Maine

The earliest stories peg Paul Bunyan

a seven-foot muscle-bound marvel in plaid.

But now his feet leave lakes in their wake,

head in the clouds, whole forests sheared

with one devastating sweep of his axe,

the mountain tops tickling Babe’s blue belly.

I once saw a Big-Leaf Maple leap

from sprig to tree in a single spring,

a six-foot stretch in a three-month span,

gulping in the sunlight’s glare

as a galloping thoroughbred sucks in air,

the racetrack thundering at the final turn,

steady crescendo from start to end,

swelling as cotton left out in the rain,

as discontent can pressurize

into a volatile midday mob

incensed at Emery’s editorials,

throwing his press out the fourth-story window,

a rotating aerial accelerating into

the merciless cobblestone waiting below,

not far from where now sits a house

surrounded by a bat-winged gate

where Stephen King once churned out novels

at a rate of two thousand words a day,

burgeoning sales in the hundreds of millions,

mimicking the stampede of lumberfeet

that once roared through Bangor’s port

like a wild horde of mares in heat.

The tumbling rock, the launching rocket,

all of it wanting to fall into gallop.

Even the trotters are out breaking records--

Nelson at Bass Park in Ninety-One.

I wonder how they’ll tell his story,

gathering together their children’s children,

how in mid-race he began to rise

pulling his sulky up into the skies

over the northeast Penjajawoc woods,

pureeing the low-lying clouds into mist

with the powerful kick of his air-whipping hooves.

The more fanciful versions of Paul Bunyan find their roots in the work of William Laughhead, and in particular can be traced to a promotional pamphlet he produced for the Red River Lumber Company in 1916.
The mob incident described in this poem happened in August of 1861. The provocative editor of The Democrat was Marcellus Emery.
Stephen King lived in Bangor from 1979 to 2016. See the picture of his house below.
Bangor was a key lumber export city in mid-nineteenth century, with 150 saw mills along its river, and 150 million lumberfeet annually passing through its docks by 1860.
Nelson (see below) was a world class trotting harness race-horse that clocked a world-record mile time on the half-mile Bangor horse racetrack at Bass Park in 1890.