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?

The Harvest Moon, in Camden (Anniversarius 45)

And I came, on the night of the harvest moon,

this thirteenth tropical night of the cool ninth month,

and, as I had been beckoned by bell and raven,

I found myself before a familiar tomb,

and its door was ajar and full moon showed me

the undulating form of a great serpent

(black she was and beautiful, sleek of skin

as the Queen of Sheba) and she rose up

and welcomed me. “Enter!” she said, “You

have I called, as well as many others,
and only you have tread the dream-realm,
crossed seven thresholds to stand before me.

Are you not afraid?”

“Afraid at his tomb,

he at whose knees I learned to sing and write?
Much as I fear Death, I do not fear him!”

And a voice inside the sepulchre uttered:

“Come, be not at all fearful. Here there is peace,

though my soul is fitful and weeping.

“I am Walt Whitman, a man, a citizen of Camden.

Reach out and touch the stone of my father,

the stone behind which my mother sleeps.

Touch this rough stone behind which my bones,
my hair, my ever-sinewed limbs, cannot slumber;

least of all my two eyes, my third eye celestial,

my mouth that cannot cease its uttering.

“For it has come to me that the land is troubled.

I ask, Has it yet come to pass that a woman sits

in the chair of Jefferson and Lincoln? I fear not,

and it has come to me that the occupant who sits

in the White House in Washington is not a good

or a fair man; that his hands are full of gold

and not forgiveness; that a man who reads no books

attempts to make science; that corruption spreads

like black tar from a broken well across the land;

“That under poisoned air and water the earth quakes

fractured with the greedy extraction of gas,

that shale, which slept before the dreamings

of sauropods and tyrannosaurs, is rent

by force of water, o incompressible!

that the workmen no longer know

when their labor begins or ends, that the slaves

are not so called yet put on chains again, that men

of one color flee down the streets in terror of arms

and men of no color at all in rage pursue them;

that it is no shame among you that some are roofless

and many must bear the stain of beggary to eat;

that the sick, when they are healed, are told to pay

until their bank accounts are drained, their houses lost;

that worse than in debtors’ jails the poor abide

in tents on the sidewalk, poor-towns behind

the stench-rows of oil tanks and refineries;

that the limousine-rich sell death and addiction

while mothers plead for an unpoisoned tap

from which to feed and bathe their infants,

while the Cappuccino-fueled Civil Servant says,

“Well, everyone has to die of something”;

that refugee children are caged like rabbits;

that a man with a turban or a kippa, a woman

whose faith requires a head-scarf, shall endure

the clenched fist of an ignorant mob.

“If the occupant of the White House is not

a good and fair man, or a good and fair woman,

what hope is there for the shining star

that cannot emerge from the night-cloud?

“To these states I say, as I have always said,

but even more to the people, one by one:
Resist much, and obey little.

And failing this, must the dead emerge

from their tombs to admonish you?

Have you no poets or statesmen?”

With a great sigh, the voice went dead.

I heard only a distant siren, a gunshot,

what might have been a woman’s scream,

then silence. The great black snake,

which had stood erect through all the speaking,

sank to the granite floor of the tomb

and slid into the darkness. I stood,

my own shadow in solitary moonbeam

extended to the Good Gray Poet’s stone

at the back of his self-made mausoleum.