Classic and Contemporary Poetry
WALT WHITMAN IN ALABAMA, by JAKE ADAM YORK First Line: Maybe on his way to gadsden Subject(s): Alabama; Poetry & Poets; Whitman, Walt (1819-1891) | ||||||||
Maybe on his way to Gadsden, Queen City of the Coosa, to speak with the pilots and inland sailors, to cross the fords Jackson ran with blood or meet the mayor who bought the ladies' favors with river quartz, maybe east from some trip west to see or returning north from New Orleans or just lost in those years after The War as legend has it, after the bannings, when he'd grown tired of puffs and plates, after he's grown the beard and begun to catch things there he had to walk off or sing unwritten, maybe when the open road opened on mockingbirds two and two -- no one knows, though the stories have him here recapturing Attalla, shaking poems from his hair on the steps of local churches. Maybe it was the end of many letters, the last of hospital days, another sleight to make his hand come alive when he couldn't bring some Southern home. I see him there remembering his poems, his back to the door, singing out to the garden of the world, the tropical spring of pine and jasmine, how wondrous it was the pent -up river, washed to green their farms, the creeks swole with mountain dew to sprout the corn, herbage of poke and collard, spinach and bean, to wash the roots of every leaf to come. But more I wonder what he did not say, whether the doors were closed on the room where none thought Jesus ever naked, whether he went down Gadsden's Broad to the bluff where a hundred years thence someone fabled a child lost from the arms of his Hispanic mother and almost saved by a cop who brought from his pocket a shirt's worth of proof before the woman vanished with her English, before the psychics started rowing down the channel to listen for the baby's dreams-all years after the whorehouses, the fires, Reconstruction and true religion came, after Whitman said his piece and left the country to its mayors, its wars and local dramas, Broad Street and its theaters to opening and closing and being torn down to photograph and rumor where vaudeville variety traveled in those years before the world became real and history stilled, before the dams stalled the yearly flood that washed the roots and made new fields from catfish and shit and the mountain dead, before the sun in the tassels was wormed to shine, before shine dried into the hills with the snakes, the poetry, the legend. I imagine him here in the different city, bathing in the yellow light as the river slips beneath the bridge, flickering like a candle or like the body or like the bodies lit up with gasoline and beer, tremble of taillights, while the statue of the Civil War heroine points fingerless down Broad, down the stream of headlamps and embers of burning weed, a congregation in which his secrets and his song would be unwelcome, though he slake some secret thirsts, his orotund voice tune our ears to the river's whisper, a baby cradled in branches deep beneath the bridge. Its ribs filter the Coosa's brown. Its arms raise the crops. And every night it whispers the town in some new forgotten tongue. Copyright © Jake Adam York. http://www.wlu.edu/~shenando | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ODE TO WALT WHITMAN by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET TWO RAMAGES FOR OLD MASTERS by ROBERT BLY QUIRKS: 2. THAT AFTERNOON I REMEMBERED by JOHN CIARDI READING WALT WHITMAN by CALVIN FORBES FOR WALT WHITMAN by DAVID IGNATOW WAITING INSIDE by DAVID IGNATOW WALT WHITMAN IN THE CIVIL WAR HOSPITALS by DAVID IGNATOW METAMORPHOSES: 3. PERSEUS (WALT WHITMAN) by WAYNE KOESTENBAUM |
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