For Walt Whitman, A Townsman of Mine, An Impregnation of His Sweetest Poem

FOR WALT WHITMAN, A TOWNSMAN OF MINE,
AN IMPREGNATION OF HIS SWEETEST POEM



When I wanted to learn when poetry happens
and what good it does in cities,
Death’s own greenhouses,
or in the army’s killing fields,
I heard a voice
left over from my childhood
when I still believed the things I learn’d
were true and I wanted to be an astronomer,
an alchemist, to summon friends
out of the sky who would come to me,
when I hungered for the proofs of love
revealed in how the figures of desire behaved
who were ranged in columns of women
and men before me,
when I was shown the beautiful entanglements
of the ordinary, words you could trip over,
how you could drown in maps and sea charts and
climb up the diagrams of geometry to add,
divide and actually make love with angels
I could try to measure
while I tried to make them aid me,
when I saw them sitting there above the world
and heard the astronomer where he busily lectured
in my heart with much confidence
about the eternal animals aloft
that feed on all our dying,
our death rattles sound like applause to them,
while we in the lecture room of cathedrals
praise them –

how soon I lost faith in my gematria,
all the tricks, the unaccountable
chemistry of fear, failure, I became
suddenly just a plain man trying to talk,
tired and sick but telling the truth,
till the moon was rising
and gliding over the rooftops of Brooklyn,
out over the wooden water-towers of Manhattan,
I loved them, those stalwart minarets
of the only true religion,
on every roof! old wood, old water,
I wander’d off by myself,
in all that was left of the mystical,
the ordinary moist
night-air that all of us, woman and man,
easy could breathe,
breathe and breed and tell the truth
from time to time,
I let myself be one among the ones around me,
let myself touch and be touched,
and if I had a word
I gave it to you, you all around me,
the ones who look’d up
and saw me standing in front of them,
gibbering and spouting my poesy,
seeming to have something
of portent to tell them,
some word that was in perfect
marriage between them and myself
or myselves,
whoever I thought myself to be at that moment,
but instead of hearkening
they would turn in silence
and smile at me and touch me lightly
on the lip or the hand
and with their whole arm
point tenderly upwards
saying Brother, Lover,
those are just the stars.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on one of his sites RK-ology