[New-Poetry] Another look at Whitman

[JforJames at aol.com]

Whitman:
 
_I say we had better look our nation searchingly
in the face, like a  physician diagnosing some deep disease._
—Democratic  Vistas
 
_Look for me under your bootsoles._
 
On Long Island, they moved my clapboard house
Across a turnpike, &  then felt so guilty they
Named a shopping center after me!
 
Now that I’m required reading in your high schools,
Teenagers call me a  fool.
Now what I sang stops breathing.
 
And yet
It was only when everyone stopped believing in me
That I  began to live again—
First in the thin whine of Montana fence wire,
Then  in the transparent, cast-off garments hung
In the windows of the poorest  families,
Then in the glad music of Charlie Parker.
At times now,
I  even come back to watch you
>From the eyes of a taciturn boy at  Malibu.
Across the counter at the beach concession stand, 
I sell you hot  dogs, Pepsi, cigarettes—
My blond hair long, greasy, & swept back
In a  vain old ducktail, deliciously
Out of style.
And no one notices.
Once,  I even came back as me,
An aging homosexual who ran the Tilt-o-Whirl
At  country fairs, the chilled paint on each gondola
Changing color as it picked  up speed,
And a Mardi Gras tattoo on my left shoulder.
A few of you must  have seen my photographs,
For when you looked back,
I thought you caught  the meaning of my stare:
 
Still water,
Merciless.
 
A Kosmos. One of the roughs.
 
And Charlie Parker’s grave outside Kansas City
Cover with weeds.
 
Leave me alone.
A father who’s outlived his only child.
 
To find me now will cost you everything. 


--Larry Levis, _The Selected Levis_, (U of Pittsburgh Press,  2000)



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