Walt and Joe

Until I learned that my father was bisexual,I had never thought of associating himwith Walt Whitman. It had always been easierconnecting my mother to the poet—she’d have fit inat Pfaff’s, playing piano for all the revelersas she did at parties in our apartment,and wasn’t Whitman the mother of us all?

But now I see that my father,uneducated, a laborer, no more bookishthan the tradesmen and mechanics Whitman loved,could have been one of his roughs—though a gentle, sweet one—on the Brooklyn docks.

In the picture of my father and his navy buddy,both of them in uniform, heads close together,I want that discoloration in the backgroundto be not the work of timebut the ghost of the poet,an emanation like a blessing on these thoughts.

And because I believe that Whitman, who saidhe met strangers in the street and loved them,would have loved my father if he had met him,I hereby take my father’s hand and place it in Walt’sto introduce them: Walt, Joe; Pop, Walt.

Let them talk of mothers—Whitman’s beloved one, my orphaned father’sdead before he could remember her— and war—the Civil and the First World Wars.And maybe my father says something of me,how he feared my education would separate usthough it never did.

And now they are sleeping together, armsthrown leisurely around each other,perhaps in the bunkbed of the shipmy father sailed on, the small spacemade even smaller by the presence of the two bodies,their long peaceful breaths mingling as they dream.That’s Walt Whitman, I’d say, to anyone who’d listen and look,and next to him, I’d add proudly, that’s my father.