Going

Going now to dark, going now to write in the darklove-cabinet. The red fish like a stuffed glove on the desk,going out of gray all the time, gray seeping back. I like Beckettwhen he scoffs white and black. Going in out of light in outof my undercover love. Now seal the window. Our smells already flown—  soft flowers of air or ash-tufts undone. The sound insidethe walls a heart. There’s the night in your voice again, snakewoodalive in the hearth. Nobody spoke when the smoke rose. I’m going nowto dark. Going to lift the coverlet and feel your face there even when it’snot, going with my solo hand inside to still a willowby its thirsting root. There’s another page of light—all trees are stately—  I don’t care how slovenly some think they seem, snagged by fishline,straggling roots half-drowned, bruised knuckles with a tight blue sheen—all trees are venerable citizens and are divine. I head into their darklove-cabinet with you, a morning of roughshod stone in out ofthe dark love past the last bright bursts of thready lavender-blueasters before we disappear again.  Going now to write in the dark. I feared your heartwas footfall down the hall, someone or something trying to undous. Watch us watching the autumn trees in the wind laughing and losingpieces of themselves. We are alert and high and bright, carrying the airwell, carrying the air not on a stretcherbut in our hair, its high bright pieces in our hair. Beckett  was correct—he was inching back into gray when it fled. Where the dark isnow, we lay on a slab of wood in the sun. Where the dark was then,now a lit glade, love-cabinet  we are tendrils of light in the dark of it.

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892) is universally recognized as one of America’s greatest poets and one whose vital influence remains evident all over the world. Born near Huntington, Long Island, he and his family soon moved to Brooklyn, New York, where his father continued to work as a builder, struggling to support a large and troubled family. Whitman’s education in a school for the poor ended after the sixth grade, when he was eleven. He subsequently found work as an office boy and then as a printer’s apprentice. For a while he taught school in Long Island, before founding a weekly newspaper there and devoting his efforts to journalism and other forms of writing. From 1846 to 1848 he served as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a job he lost because of his general opposition to slavery (in large part because he regarded it as inimical to the well-being of the white working class); he traveled to the South to find work, but his subsequent employment at the New Orleans Crescent was terminated for similar political reasons after only three months. Returning to New York, he founded a newspaper called the Brooklyn Freeman, advocating for the position of the Free Soil Party, which also saw slavery as a threat to white laborers. After the publication of a single issue, this paper’s offices were burned to the ground.

Over the next few years, Whitman appears to have lived with his parents in Brooklyn and taken on odd jobs while he rambled around the city and read widely. His emergence into greatness took place on July 4th, 1855, when under the influence of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson he self-published the astonishing first edition of Leaves of Grass, an octavo volume containing a preface made up of a series of emphatic pronouncements followed by a dozen poems, effectively untitled, linked in a continuous sequence; no author was named on the title page, though alongside it there appeared an engraved portrait of the artist as a working man caught in a casual pose, his head slightly cocked and one arm akimbo. Of the 795 copies printed, one was sent to Emerson, who responded with a letter declaring the...