Walt Whitman,
You were the one at the foot of the bed in a folding chair, passing your hat back and forth from hand to hand as you told what you could remember of the daily papers and then dug inside yourself for something more to talk about with the man in the bed. You passed on the sidewalk and said nothing but saw the boy and the man throwing long passes at each other in the gravel street and heard the scuffle of heels digging in to support the momentum of the pass, the ball spinning in a more or less perfect clockwise spin all the way until it hit the calloused palms at the other end and impacted that spin into the dense smack of leather. You left your hat on the window sill as you walked around the house, leaving no thing uninspected for signs of life. Did they come to life because they had always been alive? Or was it you who touched them and made them so?
You, who stood for hours over the sink with your arms contorted into the postures of a sculptor and made your face into a mask of absolute concentration as you prepared the vegetables for soup, and you who stood over the same sink after many years had passed but not so many as to forget all the times before, weeping. You, who stood and wept, and you, who could not yet understand the loving act of weeping, but knew how empathy made the shoulders hunch toward the chest under the shared, invisible pull of the heart. You were the one who lived in the old blue trailer on the bank of the slough, and the one who died in it, and the one who hid behind it with your back tense against the rusted metal, your skin wet and sulfurous from the slough, your eyes adjusting to the sudden dark and the shock of such private knowledge. You were the one inside the toy chest when it was closed and the one who vanished when it was opened, and the cough of dust which spiraled out into the sunlight of the living.
You saw the weeds growing up and through and all around the cars which had been parked for decades in the fields behind the houses where people stayed up talking around fires, and you pulled the weeds, long vines with blossomed roots raining dirt, through the windowless driver’s side door until you had cleared a seat for yourself, and crawled in and smelled the decomposing leather and knew the story of things going back into the earth. You were the one who leaned painlessly down and reached your gloved hand out to show how the road curved back in, away from the coast, back in toward the little towns full of houses with flags in the upper story windows and porches indistinguishable from sidewalks.
How did you know they would be coming? What comfort can your clean-haired Yankee girls sew for me? And what bushels of what long-dead harvest can your slave pick for me? How did you know that the closer you listen, the less there is to say? How did you unlearn to speak? Where did you unlearn your shame? Where did you unlearn to write and what instrument is in you that you use, instead, which echoes so loudly but is still a secret? You know that all I have to give in order to be wise is my life, and my life is all I have, and it’s only mine for the length of a line or two.
