Summer of 1967: Cleveland, Ohio

by Brett Rutherford

Cityscape to townscape

   Concrete to clapboard

      Cleveland to nameless tree-

         lined hydrant peppered

            dogwalk

Streets seen from the blur of bus yet

   slowing, limning in slant

      of afternoon for me

twenty years old on my first journey West,
Walt Whitman’s poetry open on my lap,
atop it the journal I am writing in

         this slice of nation:

The lonely boy on the porch

   this Ohio summer of '67

      looks up, sees me

         seeing him, writing

            him here on this page —

perched on this pile of Whitman,

   Connecticut Yankee, damnable

      Moby Dick (my transcon-

      tinental shelf of books)

And old Walt said: look at him.

   A long red light permitting, I looked.

   He smiled, not as if at any one

   of the tinted faces of dusty green

   Grey-monoxide-hound,  but at me —

he regarded me as intently as I, him —

And Walt whispered:
There are wonderful secrets everywhere,

and one of them is that you and he are a poem.

      Sidewalk — a boy and a girl

      wave to the porch boy      he waves

      distractedly, still looking at me,
my eye locks on him as my pen
scribbles on, robotically.

My pen hand  begins to tremble.
Oh, this moment, Walt!

Would that I stopped and had spoken to you,

blond Ohio, I think I might have loved you,

   and you as well might have loved me —

I saw nothing else and hills

   turned to plains,

   to seas of swept green,

saw only eyes and a tousled-haired

   boy head blue-eyed with parted lips
asking my name and are we a poem?

And would I not later find

that there are always eyes

that flash and promise everything,
and that I must do the same in return,
whatever the cost —

   at forty miles an hour and the states

   still whisking by, I am still thinking of him.

I marvel, but Walt has taught me well
already, that one can love so much
and be loved in an instant
of recognition.

Was he merely beautiful,

this never-forgotten fleeting one?
Or has he remembered the fire
of one glance that led him to books,
to a world beyond the lake-front porch?

And if the War did not come and take him,
did he not walk too with the good gray Poet
and make his way West to glory?