“Old Walt” by Langston Hughes
Old Walt Whitman
Went finding and seeking,
Finding less than sought
Seeking more than found,
Every detail minding
Of the seeking or the finding.
Pleasured equally
In seeking as in finding,
Each detail minding,
Old Walt went seeking
And finding.
“Walt Whitman in the Car Lot, Repo or Used” by Gillian Connoly
Walt Whitman is wearing mirrored sunglasses
behind the wheel
of the buttercup yellow Mercury,
so that only when I see him do I see me.
I am in my black karate gi
not unlike the silk pajamas from my era,
and I’m late to the Center for Martial Arts
because my car is going to ash
in its heavenly naked body.
I don’t want to think about the blistering Pontiac
that carried an actress to the river
and leapt as she leapt, or the dreamboat
with perfume still on the dash.
Like any red-blooded American I lose the urge
to murder someone who oppresses me at every moment.
I think my pain is on another plaza,
and I want to sleep awhile, a day, a century.
But this dead man who looks in on me from the edge of my hammock.
What a burning angel he seeks and is,
swaggering toward each car trying hard to be a horse.
A drop of spittle in the shade.
a rose in the clenched teeth of a grille…
Time is a breeze that drowses in the sales banner
because he is not dead,
though he has died ten thousand times before,
on other shores where life was avoided.
The corpse of a car is mere manure
into which he steps unoffended
and shakes his white locks.
On the half busted radio
he tunes a modern music,
an ashcan rant so I’ll suspend my sleep
and sit shotgun,
looking for the hymn in the hymnal.
The butterflies in his beard are an explanation.
The gnats spinning around my head
a rendezvous. Every song he hears
he titles Me, until we look out,
then inward from the edge of the car lot,
as though it were our sea.
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