What has happened, Walt, in your absence, and has not happened!
This is not the honesty of me, this is conduit of my country of me;
And bitterness and cheap rage is the flag of our time, distracted wit,
Confused compassion for death, fear, communal orgiastic death!
It has not fulfilled itself, your prophecy, that when the grubbing slime
And dear of property take on the earth, hold offices of paper pride,
Only then all liberty would shake, its candleflame near gone, and not yet gone;
But it is your prophecy, the ugly of the earth who rise in beautiful toxins,
Though we timid are too decadent to realize this; that no thing is of more nature
Than what wrecks ours; and beautiful only in smallness are the pleasant things
Your world too was full of then, the bones you incorporated, the drooling man
Filled with blood for his country, which is not denied your country, and can never deny;

America is not a poem, Walt; at least not one your soul could bear to read,
Worthy and becoming in its peaks and strip malls, tornadoes of silent defiance
And tongues of tongues, unfocused revelry of rotting meat that closes down
Rooflike and similar to you;

It is your soul itself that cannot read, it fattens the decline of this
Grown ugly and profuse with cheap desires and cold frugality;
You taught us to throw off our books, Walt Whitman, and toil in the earth,
That no thing learned was essential but the body of one, all else encompassing,
But we learned only that you were essential, and forgot that too;
Unled by your breath it has decayed otherwise, like an airless parachute,
A dumb dead Icarus already crushed and battered before he hits the wave.

We have not cast ourselves naked in the sea, supple and reclined, extenuating;
Our shame has clung to us, because your greatness taught us shame;
You who were all knew us as finite, and laughed and plummeted
From an astral bed to delight in momentary lowness, the low of our lives;
You admonished us for needing gods, as you strode god-like in the land
Affecting prophecy, your words that mould and fetter us gleeful, unpossessing;

This America awaits you, Walt, cryogenical and false,
Ungrateful and greedy for your skull America awaits you,
And Europe, and Africa, stuttering in the shadows and playing critical
To the executions we lead out in your name, the salvage of the soul;
Bitter in the crank of gears a world awaits you, the promised son,
Flooding with your joy the bare alive, the furious living.
It is not origin; it is not Whitman; not name or sentiment,
Nor mere desire; of your negations you forgot desire, dear Walt, which rots the bloom
It opens; but of you forgotten the visions most terrible remind us,
We are the rotten bloom of your open heart, the end of your sentence,
We do not know ourselves or care, what is hideous and insincere in us
All wilts in the halogens of your wisdom. An end of vision, Walt,
Of blinding light to us in the dark road; we are but now your roadkill
As you churn in your eternal car always in search of America,
Trample her with your bootsoles, devour and chug her fluids and pollute
The woods with your gasoline and wreck, which too of you is the eternal;
This rage is not of you, poor Walt, it is America thumbing her ass and waiting
For your prophecy, which has arrived too soon and cannot return a second:
A thousand universes must seed and thrive before but one of you arrives,
Father of us all admonishing, tending the walls of the land,
Grown senile and wistful for a story none care to hear.

Yet if we love you (and it must be love, this factory in the brain)
How could we hear your word, or follow it as some beagle for a crumb, which is
A natural halo about a natural swamp, and no more of creation than this sickness
Which forgets your love, which has no need for impotent old men hallucinating
Of a plastic earth, which is the real and sensile cover of this claybreath air;
We are near you, Walt, because we have almost killed you; it is this almost
That ruins, the unfulfilled that rages in the mechanism that runs desires.

Let there be no almost!

To decline! To ash! To living rooms steep with cushions small in the mind!
To the glow of burning books, books forgotten, philosophies crushed
In a war against demand! This is your pyre, Walt, your sweet animal ignorance
Matting and sucking at a neuron, coagulated, refiguring a mystery;
We are smaller planets of the stuff of you, we decay you with our cleverness.

We do not blush at your body, Walt Whitman;
What is a body when a man has seen the great gates of blood colliding
In the last city of the dead; and the phoenix earth nubile and sycophant, erect
Over the celluloid of nightfall; and every man now is of the same profession,
Waiting and lusting and whining for an end,
And at last there is no time to blush.

And yet we have been false with you;
(We would conceal from you our mystery, but you are our mystery and always know)
We would be proud as you, but our nakedness yet ashames us;
(you were right as always because you were nothing)
It is blood we know, America mother of blood; you swam in its oceans
Which were of blood, coursing and instructing your veins:
But blood cannot prove us to honor our skin.

This is the talk of the critics; who know where to find you, Walt,
In the movies, anachronism now as then, conversational and wet
To the hum of murdering lovers, sighing and caressing
As ice conceals the globe, an ancient empire falls, each your passion equally,
Masturbating quietly to the glow of the cinema
Unfulfilled, fulfilling, asexual, coming like a knife
To split this world, this satire that can only roll in shame
Before your greatness, which is the nation bent in shame
That seems a pride; only it is sharpness never bent upon itself.

They would say the pulse of your arousal is a cock you dare not gaze on;
(But we few know, a thing of God cannot be seen directly; we will keep your secrets, Walt)
They are there, Walt humping at your feet and wishing you pitiful as they
Who do not suffice, never suffice themselves, and see in you the anger of completion;
And there are those who would paint you chaste, tittering in symmetries,
Geometrical, aloft within your spheres of nothingness as a cardboard Christ;
(And it is better to keep a secret from God than knowledge of all the world;
What use is knowledge to a man, it is a giant net and he a single flame,
There is no analogy or scale. Used utterly, we crawl within your silences and burn)

Your school which was the school of freedom became a zoo of lookers,
Aluminum-caged, ravenous to destroy you, devouring your letters.
But we are here, Walt; we await inside you and wonder at your entities.
Once we would have desired to blame you, Walt, that you grew old;
But it is no more nature than a soul inscribes to fail when the way is done.
Dying I would grudge you, if it were not your way to nourish us,
And pass within us each; you taught us our lonely pride, Walt Whitman,
But you are not to blame, that your corpse has rotted and no better man has come
To mulch the earth of you and make things grow; though there are hands enough,
And unbred fantasy, sensual and weird, deserving you;
But we tire of things that grow.


Is the wonder of the senses not more
Than a weaker pulse of the mind,
A habit and a stubborn ruse of fantasy?

Oh Walt, if only you had taught us wrath
We would not be so clownish with our rage;
Everything untaught us we have botched,
All lessons of you learned perfectly and wrong.

If you had been cruel, we could thrive in the myth of your cruelness,
but the glory of your war was joy, not outward but the joy of man who sits at home
And thinks death, and does not fear; it was not the joy of real weaponry,
The real waterboards and scalps and small ingratitudes that would wreck you in reality.
...or petty cash, fat frying on the windows of the soul:
But you have set a paradise too high, so unassailable
The greatest dream acquires but a glimpse, a sliver of the vision,
In heaving high, and falls again bereft. You did not found a nation of earth
But of the dead, consoling and mumbling leather griefs in the hallways,
And finally you are of the dead, and abolish always all of the dead.

Here where we destroy you you arise, newborn and petulant,
Bearing wit in silence, and not knowing offenses.

Who is it you stare at so curiously, Walt, resurrected and eager again
To meet the company of man? Softly we will lead you, as one through hell
Approaches the long low mountain, and finally attends the stars;
Who is it who wink and surface in your wake to breathe around you?

They are the satirists; at night they offer themselves to you in coy confusion,
Pressing and wetting your skin, and go in the dark, and never know,
Care only for your body, which is not your body but a dream thereof,
Only touching what they need of you;
In the morning they mock you because they do not know you, or know and love
And are ashamed to find in them some thing they do not know–
And each enclosed in dreaming isolates, presents in public all haughtiness and pride,
But boils alone in slavish resenting, and wonders why no hand will reach
His crippled love, which is an acid that burns whatever it should touch,
A war of habit that has wit and words, quick and clever holocaust.

(Oh sweet inheritance, this monarchy of one,
Each soul an enemy that borders on the flesh!)

This is your country, Walt, though you wanted the body out of bounds, exploding,
It could not meet your demand. So the land mass shrunk to match the form.
And each man and woman bears America like a burnt desire,
A promise not delivered on, delightful and violent–

Freedom in tongues illiterate, death in living, livid flowers that burst through ice!
Frenetic to fill America void, a rolling sound, a gurgling metal syntax!

Nor is it to you, Walt Whitman, that I speak; if I will speak it will be to no one:
The one true poem is the poem unheard, it slivers in the veins
And reads itself, will not uplet, perpetuating warm and synonymous.

For you I have only caresses;
You were not bitter, Walt, because you did not make yourself,
And always were calm and animal, but you fooled us into religions
That were not animal; and we did not that all things are animal,
Even the sentence that shuts the animal from man (especially the sentence!)

Or perhaps it is not you, and you are symptom and excuse;
Of some more primal thing, begun before you and beginning still
Of which we are the end, and you the audience,
Unaware in your beloved cinema (which you have never left,
Though travelling the scarred sand you believed yourself a true explorer)
And staring at a blank reel, a reel perpetual that plays of original tones,
But always blank and a story always of real tones,
The retina outsweeping all your idleness.
We stump on outside the theater, which you love too much
To let us enter; we would steal your popcorn and a smell of urine
Would prevail, of faint irritation at this containment in a static chair
While the orgy goes on, which was never meant to be a thing of the body
But still bears no interruptions.

You were sincere alone denying yourself;
Stopping there you deny us elsewhere,
Cathedrals of your lunacy you suspend from a cloud,
Your grief, your statuesque and clever style,
Witless as we all, Walt Whitman,
For wit is the gate that chains and mocks the soul,
And freedom the absence of laughter.

Wandering the streets sometime you still might find a friend
Worth all your chivalry; a man who might hear softly in the wood
Of your delusion, and hearing give body to the heard, and care
For each part of you equally, your poems as dear as your flesh;
But for each sidekick you will find a hundred crooks who will rob you
And break your body, though they admire you, and are not worse
Than the thousand who would be your master, have you pray within their church
Which is the livid street of your making, now vilified, entombed–

Though we will not hear you we believe you, Walt, we reach for your hand
And know sincerely what we know as good, this treatment of the good;
For every love that moves the planets there is not
A pole of hatred but a pole of ridicule;
It is the uncomfortable cough in the theater that ravages your art,
And makes us shameful, who cannot hold on your vision.
It is not the raging critic, life to life as vision only can;

Irony is the foe that stabs you in the back and publishes
Your beautiful sex failures, your celebrity, as a minstrel show–
Are you not enraged, America, that your father is in ruins
And you have nothing of response but cleverness, and shows,
And timid lashes of morality?

But you are untouchable, you watch the fantasy even as it breaks you,
You feel it as a loving touch, all radiance though radiation:
Here they are, your sons, far too unserious to laugh,
too weak to see that your love is a chastisement;
and again I mean to talk of you but can only speak indirectly,
To you the master of the indirect, of all poets
Who sing of nature but mean the distant in themselves,
The wild they do not know;
It is this unnecessary craft that ruins nations,
The flapping word that does not burn or sling, inspire war,
Or pacify an ancient wound;

The crystal self of the body burns within you, who read this:
It is a romance some mistake for simple dreaming, they who would
Conceal the muse and pacify the effected;
But what man should you love but the fire within you,
The fire within the man you sit beside; and in warm silence
You may sit as well, not know each one small thing of the other
But your visions, which are all a man lives by and as basic as his limbs,
But still more personal and public, honoring and never sacred
The real and processional romance of the soul.


And if he dies,
Or shuts his love, do not turn jealousy on the evening;
Which is observer and not conspirator
(and you must conspire always, always scheme!)

The funeral of your love seals him forever inside you;
You must then grow or crush you both.

So parting is forever a promise,
That each will tend the other's fantasy
As tenuous and dear as one's own life is;
Nor is it some burden when think of the person
...

If I know one entity of you I know your body intimate,

Sophocles

Many sought in vain to say the joyfullest joyfully
Here finally it speaks to me, here in grief itself declaring.

The raging poet

Fear not the poet, should he nobly rage; his letter does
Kill, but it is that spirit that can enliven spirits.


To young poets


Dear brothers! Our art perhaps is ripe,
since, like the young, it has been long fermented,
soon to the stillness of beauty;
be but glad, as was the Greek!

Love the gods and think kindly of the dead!
Hate noise, as frost! Do not teach or describe!
If the masters make you fear,
ask great nature for advice.

The lovers

We wanted to separate, supposed it good and smart;
But as we did, why did it horrify us as murder, the act?
Ah! We know ourselves little,
For in us a God prevails.

False Popularity

Oh that knower of men! He plays at childishness with children,
But the tree and the child crave what is above him.

Descriptive Poetry

Know this! Apollo is become the god of journalists
And his man is he, who tells him the fact exactly.

Half Life

With golden pears it hangs
and full of wild roses
the land into the sea,
you proud swans,
and drunk with kisses
you dunk your heads
in the sober holy water.

Woe, where shall I take,
when it is winter, the flowers,
where sunshine,
and shadows of earth?

The walls stand
Mute and cold, in the wind
The flags rattle.

Patmos

Near
God is and difficult to grasp.
But where danger is as well there grows
Salvation.
In dark they live,
the eagles, and fearlessly
the sons of the Alps go over the abyss
On bridges built lightly.
Oh, as there around
The peaks of time lay piled, and the dearest ones
Live near to us, grown weak upon
The separate mountains,
thus give us innocent waters,
Give us wings, and truest minds
To venture and return.

So speaking, then a spirit took me
faster than I could believe
from my own house farther
than I ever thought to go.
Dawning in the twilight
I went among the shadowed woods
And wistful streams of the homeland;
I never knew these lands;
But soon, in new radiance, mysterious
In the golden haze,
Grown rapidly
With the steps of the sun,
perfumed with a thousand peaks,

Asia spread before me. Dazzled I searched
For something known, for I was unused
To the broad streets, where coming down
From the Tmolus the gold-bedecked Paktolos rides
And Taurus stands and Messogis
And the garden full of flowers,
As a silent fire; but up in the light
A silver snow flourishes high;
And, as a witness of immortal life
on impenetrable walls,
the ivy grows immemorial; but they are borne
by living columns, cedars, and laurels,
the solemn,
god-built palaces.

Yet round Asia's gates there rush
here and there outstretching
in uncertain levels of the sea
enough of unshaded straits,
though a sailor knows the islands.
And since I heard
that one of them nearby
was Patmos,
I desired much
To stop there and to there
Draw near to that dark grotto.
For not as Cyprus
Rich with springs, or
any of the others, is Patmos
situated; not augustly,

But she is hospitable
in her poorer house
and if from a shipwreck or lamenting
for his homeland or
a departed friend
A stranger nears her,
she hears gladly, as do her children
The voices of the hot grove,
and where the sands blow, and the surface
of the field is cracked, these noises
Hear him and lovingly repeat
the lamentations of the man. So once she cared
For he whom god had loved,
the seer, who in a holy youth was

Bound with
the son of the highest, inseparably, for
the bearer of storms had loved the simpleness
of his disciple, and that mindful man had seen
The countenance of god directly,
Since they sat together
at the mystery of the wine, when it came
to the hour of the last supper,
And in his great soul, calmly foreseeing his own death,
The Lord spoke of that and also of his final love,
for he had never enough of words to speak
of kindness, then, and to lighten, when he saw it,
The wild rage of the world:
For all is good. Then he died. There would be
much to say of this. And they saw him as he glanced, victorious,
joyful even at the end, his friends,

But they mourned, now evening was come
in shock, for they had great ambitions in their souls,
these men, but beneath the sun they loved
their lives and did not wish to leave
the countenance of the lord
and the homeland. It drove into them
Like fire into steel, and at their side
The shadow of their beloved went.
Therefore he sent the spirit upon them
And the house did shake and the storm of God
Rolled thundering far above
their expectant heads, as they were gathered
musing heavily, these heroes set for death,

As now he came to them once more
in parting. For now died off the day of sun
majestically, the unbent radiating scepter
broken from himself, as a suffering God,
For he would come again
when the time was right. It would have been wrong
Much later, and disloyal, cutting off abruptly
his work with man, but now
it pleased him
To live in loving night, to preserve
in simple eyes steadfast
abysses of wisdom. And there also flourish
Deep in the mountains living images,

Though it is fearful how god has scattered
the living endlessly here and there.
And so it was to leave the faces
of dear friends behind and go off
into the mountains alone,
where recognized twice
the holy spirit was united; and it was not prophesied,
but grabbed then at the hair, in the moment
When hurring away
the god glanced back upon them
And vowing, so he would stop,
holding forth as if bound with golden ropes
they outstretched their hands
and called it evil–

But then when dies
who beauty most had loved,
so that a miracle was on his form
and gods had chosen him, and when
eternally they are a riddle for each other
And each cannot grasp
the other, those who live on together
in memory; and when this comes that tears away
not only sand or pastures and destroys
the temples, but when the fame
of the demigod and his disciples
disappears and even the highest
turns his countenance, so that
no immortal thing is seen in heaven or
on green earth– what then is this?

It is the toss of the winnower,
when he shovels up the wheat
and throws it to the clean air,
swinging it across the threshing floor.
Before him falls the chaff down at his feet,
but finally the kernel emerges.
It is not bad if some of it gets lost,
or of his speech the living tone then fades–
for the work of gods is much like our own,
The highest does not want all done at once.
As mineshafts bear iron
and Etna its glowing resins
so I had richness,
an image to form, alike
to look on, Christ as he was,

But if one spurred himself along
and talking sadly, on the road, assaulted me
since I was helpless, and as a servant sought
to replicate an image of the God-
once in their rage I saw them visibly
the lords of heaven, not that I would become something,
but that I would learn. The lords are kind, but what they hate the most
While they do reign, is falsehood, when there is no more
Among men what can be called humanity. For they do not preside, but what presides
is Fate undying, and its work proceeds then
Of itself, and hurries to its end.
When heavenly processions lead still higher
the strong then call him, as the sun, the exultant son of the highest,

As a watchword, and here is the staff
of song, that beckons downward,
for nothing is wicked. It awakens the dead
Who are not yet corrupted. But many
there are of shy eyes still awaiting
to see this light. They do not wish
to flourish in the sharp radiance,
for a golden bridle holds their courage back.
But when,
with eyebrows risen
forgetting of the world
A calm radiance then falls from holy scripture,
they may enjoy that grace,
and in their quiet sight may study it.

And if the gods now do,
As I believe, love me,
how much more must they You,
for one thing I know, that the will
of the eternal father
concerns you greatly.
His sign is silent
in the thundering heavens. And one stands beneath it
All his life. For Christ lives on.
But it is the heroes, they his sons
who all have come, and holy scriptures
of him, and the deeds of the earth
elucidate the lightning now
like a race unstoppable. But he is there. For his works
he has known from the beginning.

Too long, for far too long
the honor of the gods has been invisible.
For they must nearly guide
our fingers, and shamefully
A force is torn from us by the heart.
For every heavenly thing expects a sacrifice,
but if this is neglected,
it has never brought good.
We have served our mother, earth,
as well the light of sun, without awareness,
for what the father loves the most,
who reigns over all,
is that the fixed word be maintained,
that what endures be well interpreted.
So German song must follow in this way.

Perhaps all men then end like Chaplin,
Bumbling and sprawling and interrupted by titles
That brace existence, though none may speak.
And we must wander too these wobbling streets
Around these obscure hobbies of
that we cannot extricate, a small ship
That may not land on a foreign shore.
The sun is black; the walls are white,
A gracious lady awaits her stumbling fate
And as we are, it is unknown, if a small crowd
Has gathered here as if about a fire
To stir sense in these outtakes by their ridicule,
Or else some editor to cut the strands
At whim if it pleases– it need not be a tragedy,
When the last reel spins– a mere ornamented fin,
A jaunty tune, a tramp merging with the distance–
Some tears amidst applause, but mostly laughter–
that one man could stumble so, and redirect himself
Suffer the swings and the barrages as the fool,
Not a sanctified, cripple Christ but a solid man
Up and down the alleys of hard earth dignifying,
Unaware of bruises, that God has taken everything
From him, a wife, a family– the curtain pulls;
the organ grinder bows. It is good to spend a day
In the city of God.

The furnace of the sun blows on.
Infinite is the town you have travelled
Far to see, drinking in its blood.

Day is a glass bottle broken underfoot.
It is beautiful to pass this country
where the sun has
Our days have little weight; they blow like newspapers
Crushed in a pane of sky.
Over the cramps of the earth, the infinite geographies.
We have our pretty faces for the names. The names have pretty faces
For the names. Each thing born is as if written by a casual hand,
who dazed on lazy afternoons had no knowledge of the weight
Thrown earthward. It is enough to be exact
When passion fails, to pale the shadings of the wall
The mind's pale, which in the season's mind
May not dissatisfy. It is enough to watch in the street
And know a woman in the street, collecting
the bitter pandemonium of some angelic rage
As a television, tuned to a false channel, would a blurred world
Of solid value to grope among the seemed.


There is yet too much sanity in this madness.
A rotten fish propels the river upward, on the shore
A fisherman sits allegorically in the waste of his life
And the two meet, senseless.



After the witless night
Day came in long sentences.

You turned like a mouth
and shut.

sunrise on katahdin

A solitary heartbeat must suffice, if the soul has made
This blistered yearning to a skin, a blank wind rattling
Dead thoughts from the trees that lift in dim processions
Over fantasy's feet, the feet of a wanderer now still.
Still, one feels the mountain as oneself, meeting the pass
Of lone ridge that yawns and gives to the last face a mere truth
Void of shine; one has just begun to catch oneself, here
In the dark space of things unsaid, eternal hesitations,
When an ancient sun dips back, invidious, to blank night's eyes,
Its dark peaks seen in darkened pools dissolving

Irresolute truths that scatter in the brain.
Each thing's fitfulness is opened to the midnight eye:
Infinities of flickered flames that creep and wander on
This incessant lack of god. It must have once sufficed, the flame;
It must suffice. But in this endless bliss of stones we falter
Consciously, through these mute things loved by feet, and carry on
Extinct desires in object tongues, though the going soul may keep
Its needs concealed. It is audible, the heart of earth
And tendons of earth that strain beneath its vast and unfelt weight...

Perhaps we are born to carry this, an eternity the earth forgets,
a close craft, through some machine upheld in anguished cry
Pandora caught where the path ends sculpting new of earth,
Shaping earthbound things of us. And yet we breathe the sky...
We have climbed too quickly, seen the forest plunging to the floor,
The arduous path discarded like a string and disconsolately
Broken, our bodies stripped and left as we take the air.

The heart grows faint; it knows its altitude. Each earth below seems
As a man who rises and falls, craving a consciousness of sky
And vanishing vainly. We have known these episodes, these atlantic
Places that linger like a loving hand and lift, where we gather
The stones' agony and the pain of air and stand at last
Shaking the cool containments in the peak of the mind.
The highest is too high; we stand a moment; it shatters us
In swift minutia that sweep across a strand, mere exiles gathered,
Gone– this is a footprint of a father– this a wife–
This is the valley bent below us with rage, a soft thunder
Tilting the glass of daylight down, upon the gone, veiled
Forest that hides the soul. The mind unmakes this
Ecstasy of peaks, this mesh of self and miracle.
A vision sealed in a simple sleep, or a constant foot
Need not know dreaming, as if the landscape were a murdered god
The soul climbs, a childless angel pinned to the back of god.

At last there is no world but heaven, speared in the atlas air.
As a country once traveled is forgotten, it dissolves
With the thought of it. It is clear, we may not fear this leaving.
But must the mind always mark its height, its progress in time?
The mind in dreaming dreams the mind awake, like a net of hooks
Catching. So reason spreads its blanket in the new bald sun
Below a clear and miniscule past like an ant crushed by a child.
The mind wants universe and it will comb the mind outstepping
The skull to grasp at paradise, still, a slick sight held
In an empty handful on an empty globe. These unseen diameters
Hold Eden bare: this it is; the mind at radiance, when hope has fell
And vision, the raw thing beating in the meat of day.