"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
Charlie Bondhus is a poet, fiction writer and literary critic who is currently pursuing a Ph.D at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The poem below is reprinted by permission from his new chapbook, What We Have Learned to Love, which won the 2008-09 Stonewall Competition from BrickHouse Books. Charlie's full-length poetry book How the Boy Might See It will be out from Pecan Grove Press in October, and his novella Monsters and Victims will be published by Gothic Press in March 2010.
Epithalamium to Myself and Walt Whitman
As Adam early in the morning, Walking forth from the bower refresh'd with sleep, Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach, Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.
-Walt Whitman
I found Walt Whitman–
native and slithering in the tall grasses au naturel save for beard, true and biological son of Adam and Father Time.
Yet undivorced from the solid world, I considered averting my eyes and crying: "Come up from the fields, father! Show your face scraped in dead leaves smudged with herb juice and streaming with the sweet, gentle dew of buttercups." Thinking book deals and self-promotion I considered calling The Daily Sun The Hanover Press The New York Times to report this cleft of time and space this bit of transcendental news. But something about his eyes, weary and reckless, stopped me. I knew he was ashamed to go naked about the world, though clothing only constrained his meadow meanders. What wisdom, I thought, could be learned from this grizzled young gray man? What childless adventures? Sensing my hesitation, Walt, by way of greeting, spooled his body about my own: wrinkled ligaments and hairy appendages encircling my boy-shape, like Lucifer to Eve in classical painting.
Grinding white teeth he hissed affectionately:
To-day I go consort with Nature’s darlings, to-night too, I am for those who believe in loose delights
Bowing then my head to the priest of nature unvested save for crabgrass and pinecones I reverently uttered the responsorial:
For who but you or I understand lovers and all their sorrow and joy? And who but you and I, dear grandpapa, ought be poets of comrades?
Much to do, needless to say. Job had to be quit. Buses had to be boarded. Messages had to be left on lovers’ answering machines.
I admit I initially judged Walt’s value in terms of brand recognition. Considering my new companion a muscle for my rhetoric, I dragged him on board a Greyhound and bore him south.
Watching the 6 o'clock news in a D.C. hostel's common room I learned that we were in no way unique; Melville was giving a lecture entitled "I am not Ishmael" in Boston, Emerson was alive and well, already booked to speak at Dartmouth's commencement, and the Enquirer reported that Isherwood and Auden had gotten a civil union in Los Angeles.
Appointing himself captain and helmsman of brotherly mayhem, Walt drew up blueprints of the White House, shared his plan to invade the Oval Office and recite "The Song of the Broad Axe" interpolated with "I Hear America Singing" to protest outsourcing, encored by a brideless wedding march.
But, as it turned out, Walt had been too long in the ground to remember his own words.
Later that night at the hostel, lying awake back-to-back in a twin bed, I heard him singing in his sleep reimagined refrains about New York City.
Next day on the plane he pried open my lap-top with a butter knife he had somehow gotten past security, found the porn, and spent the whole flight in the bathroom, revising every poem in Calamus to assimilate bears and twinks.
Approaching the gray and brown skyline, noses and beards pointed towards JFK, I described the violent rise and sudden crash of the towers, the significance of which he appreciated, though not the stark irony of 9-1-1.
That night at CBGB’s he got in for free just for having the gumption to say he was Walt Whitman later corroborated by an NYU adjunct who happened to be standing near the door.
Wiggling like Mick Jagger to the rhythm of an all girl rock band (called, I think, "The Flaming Cunts") he danced his hips into my crotch and, diving from the stage, cried:
I am Walt Whitman! Liberal and lusty as nature!
After the set and two rounds of cosmopolitans, the moment splintered away as Walt sustained an unfortunate groin injury after propositioning the drummer— a pink haired girl in zebra halter top.
There was also a moment of jealousy when my companion fell fascinated in love with a leather queen named Boddi Elektrique. The divine nimbus of the female form, he proclaimed in amazement, wedded to the action and power of the male...
Grabbing his freckled arm, I assured a miffed Ms. Elektrique that yes his words were complimentary and yes she could've fooled me.
(Privately got revenge later by making out with a poet of lesser talent while Walt was in the bathroom.)
Tired of the East Coast and low on provisions we went shopping, arm in arm at a supermarket in California. Naturally, we ran into Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, just out of hell and trying to be domestic. We chatted about their new home in P-Town and graciously declined an offer of mescaline and a four way.
At a poetry slam in San Francisco I introduced him as a cousin to Dodie B. and later caught him in the bathroom peeking at Dennis Cooper on the other side of the divider.
Faced with expository verse self-serving metaphor and the slack-jawed applause of tongue-pierced teenagers Walt didn't need to be cajoled into reciting "Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand."
The reigning champion, a heavy girl in black jeans named Rain (spelled “R-A-Y-N-E”) was surprisingly fine with losing, dutifully informed me that she'd "SO do" me if I wasn't gay, thought it was cool that I hung out with Walt Whitman, and asked us if we knew Poe's number.
Bivouacing the next afternoon on Newport Beach, we witnessed no solemn and slow procession no halting army save that of surfer boys, comrades to be, capped in hair gel and highlights (which I patiently explained) and garbed in soft herbages of chest bristle that sprang forth from breasts like joyous leaves. All the while a pink umbrella grew, as a lone oak in Louisiana, behind and above us, as I wondered,
what could I, poet who has come, do to justify his one or two indicative words?
Leaning over, Walt slipped a ring on my finger, then growled: All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd
Overcome by the passionate surreality of it all I fell back crying:
"Dear father graybeard! Lonely old courage teacher! I ride tonight and every night with you, spooned in ecstasy with the evening star on my lips the thrush warbling in my breast pocket and lilacs spread across my trembling hand, inside a wooden box across the open roads of sombre America!"
