Where Are You Hiding, Walt Whitman

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

last line in Leaves of Grass

Where are you hiding, Walt Whitman,
you, a man of action missing in action?

I have looked through the bones and bowels
of 21^st century America to no avail,

looked small among grass roots and large
standing naked thigh deep in the rocking Atlantic.

I have looked under the Brooklyn Bridge
where the ferry you rode forth and back
once scrawled in the slate gray river
its quick language of wave and wake.

I have inhaled the rain sweet steaming
sidewalks of Manhattan where you trod
looking for America’s Bohemia.

Where are you hiding, Walt Whitman?

Surely not in the equipment crowded sky,
the space labs and satellites of modernity?
Remembering your learned astronomer’s lecture,
I look deep into the night’s religion
to see if you have become stellar,
you a constellation of all that is human,
every dust quivering particle of woman and man.

But the Christian heaven has blinded us to stars.

You rank the body equal to the soul,
good, the whole physiology of us,
lungs, heart, liver, tibia, fibula, marrow, arteries
and the red oxygen freighters that sail through them,
teeth tearing and grinding the world into digestible bits,
bladder, anus, the long industrial river of the gut,
the bewitching between of sex; legs, sheets, man, woman,
friend on the cusp of love with friend.

Let me warn you, Walt Whitman,
in case your ghost has thoughts of coming back body bold again,
in the age of electric blinking lights ad nauseam,
the human body electric has gone dark,
fear creeps cold through sternum, pelvis, and skull,
frigid ventricles, stiff veins,
the molecules of imagination grow distant from the flesh.
the ashes of lust seldom warm the genitals of love.

I have looked in hospital churches lined with wounded souls,
thinking you might be ministering to amputated
shrapnel-shredded legs, arms, feet
grieving with the young men they once belonged to.

You blessed the young soldier kissing death before dying,
comforted in his flesh by the caress of a weeping warrior,
a comrade-in-arms, not at arm’s length,
whose blue or gray uniform
and black or white skin was tattered by fire.

Your soul, dear Walt, leapt beyond impediments,
beyond the rule of ‘no’ toward a renegade ‘yes,’
your stout heart outweighed the brain’s discriminations.
and you sought beard-tangled comfort chest to chest,

You and Emily* made love to language across distances.
I hear through the thin walls of America’s house of literature
the yelps and moans of your passion,
her words picked precisely and spare,
yours flowing lavishly abundantly profuse.
I see the stained sheets of past poesy heaped on the floor
and you both naked as the alphabet on the disheveled bed
pushing strange verse through the birth bone?

I listen for the echo of your barbaric yowling yap.
Can I hear it in the savagery of gangsta rappers,
the comedians who masturbate the funny bone,
in pixelated men screwing digital women?

Your yap is muffled by the cute rodents
who inhabit our plastic fantasylands.

Where are you hiding, Walt Whitman?
I would love to hear your sardonic laugh just once among

the jingles and jangles of the television’s glaring blare.
I yearn for your democratic grin in the candidates’ debate,
point sparring fiercely with opposite point,
subtleties, charities, clarities forcefully delivered
from discerning mouths to discerning ears.

Tired of hunting for your exhausted ghost,
I sink down in a field of leafy grass just beyond
the “for sale” sign stuck in America,
my head resting on what used to be a stone.

It is then I heard the crystalline clink
echoing off the nickel-plate horizon.

I recognize this brittle lacrimation.

I have found you.
You are in our tears, Walt Whitman.

*Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet