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WHITMAN'S DEATHBED
for Lamont Steptoe
I lay down on Walt Whitman's deathbed in the upstairs bedroom
of his house in Camden, New Jersey, when the
enthusiastic Parks Department curator and
my
wife went out of
the room and down the
narrow,
well-worn
rickety stairs with its hand-smoothed banister,
I took the opportunity in all coolness and calm
to lie down on the fresh white bedspread (certainly modern)
and settle down on the mattress (also no doubt new),
but the wooden bed original with simple
rounded
bedposts Whitman's carpenter father
made for him, in the room he
died in, under
the
same white ceiling looking out of the
same window he did, in this very spot going
over the
Deathbed Edition
of The Leaves of Grass–
I sank into a gray fuzziness in the room of it, his
narrow house in Camden swept clean and
tidy for visitors, not like he
liked it, a literary
rat's nest of books and papers and
important documents, Emerson's original congratulatory letter
helter-skelter in a pile
somewhere, photos of
Tennyson tacked to the wall, a little stucco
statue of Grover Cleveland downstairs
by the
fireplace,
pictures
with more pictures tucked into their frames
(Whitman's frames never big enough!)–
no one in the house but me, the guide
and my wife now, they
chattering downstairs, Walt's bedroom quiet, endless,
ceiling the same, floorboards the same
(his dusty slippers in a
glass case downstairs
in the dining room),
window out on the
world the same–how many
people have passed by this bed, or wanted to,
when Walt was alive or dead,
even as now,
as I
lie here, the room's accoutrements different, the
street outside widened and
noisy with cars, bridges, pavements,
kids, gulls, skies, Pattersons, Nerudas, Ginsbergs, redwoods,
prairies, healthy, muscular men in
overalls, wholesome, loving
women in
aprons, ponds, rivers, paddleboats, gunfire,
the long Civil War corridors of beds on either side where
sweet soldiers waited for Walt
to kiss them to
die, wounds,
pails of black
blood, smells of sweat and wet wool, Walt in his
chair by this very
window, coverlet
up to his
chin, under that
waterfall beard Lorca saw butterflies in,
Walt's eyes like two lit tunnels buses full of
Iowa tourists or Kansas Bingo Clubs
barrel through on their
way to Atlantic City unmindful of their glory, his mouth the
Barbaric Yawp hooked up now to
TV networks arching over the whole
world
24 hours a
day,
his big body now become partly
paralyzed and emaciated as those
soldiers'
were,
as shaky as America is, whose enterprise has always been
dubious in this world, but whose
people have a deep capacity for
wisdom
nonetheless–
old wispy-haired Walt on his deathbed with
palsied hand,
erasing, writing over lines in pencil,
adding a few lines more for one last
stab at it, veined
hand shaking, a
few final statements, under this
very ceiling, in this very bed with its
four solid legs footed firmly on the
second floor bedroom in Camden, New Jersey,
slate gray
day on Mickle Street–I
could
lie here forever, dear Walt,
but I get up.
I get up. But I could
lie here forever.
4/28
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SAINT
SEBASTIAN AND SAINT JEROME'S LION
for Li-Young Lee
Saint Sebastian on his porch threw a
bouquet of buzzards at the
last bastion of evil thoughts
that
assailed him.
Saint Jerome's lion lay with chin on paws and
agate eyes afloat
near an open fire.
The night was filled to the brim with
reverberations of distant splendor,
the
darkness closed
around everything as if
lined with ermine.
Goblets spontaneously fizzed. Bridges
solid enough to walk on
spontaneously appeared.
Between towers of yellow smoke and towers of blue ash
bare Ethiopian dancers shook
amulets to make
gnats
turn to fireflies,
fireflies
to fairies,
fairies loop themselves
into large
white
birds which flew in a
slow
flock toward the
skylit
tent-flap above us
and out along an incandescent edge
where sound
emerges silken out of primordial grooves.
Saint Sebastian turned his
transparent blue eyes back to see
the Abyss open up in a fan and
emit streamers
of purple gas.
Saint Jerome's lion was dreaming of the
spirit of his previous antelope coming through
the
tall grass to forgive
him his
violence
and assuage any
sorrow he might feel.
12/2
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