FOR WALT WHITMAN, A TOWNSMAN OF MINE,

AN IMPREGNATION OF HIS SWEETEST POEM

 

When I wanted to learn when poetry happens

and what good it does in cities, Death’s own greenhouses,

or in the army’s killing fields, I heard a voice

left over from my childhood

when I still believed the things I learn’d

were true and I wanted to be an astronomer, an alchemist,

to summon friends out of the sky who would come to me,

when I hungered for the proofs of love

revealed in how the figures of desire behaved

who were ranged in columns of women and men before me,

when I was shown the beautiful entanglements

of the ordinary, words you could trip over,

how you could drown in maps and sea charts and

climb up the diagrams of geometry to add, divide and

actually make love with angels I could try to measure

while I tried to make them aid me,

when I saw them sitting there above the world

and heard the astronomer where he busily lectured

in my heart with much confidence

about the eternal animals aloft that feed on all our dying,

our death rattles sound like applause to them,

while we in the lecture room of cathedrals praise them –

 

how soon I lost faith in my gematria,

all the tricks, the unaccountable chemistry of fear,

failure, I became suddenly just a plain man trying to talk,

tired and sick but telling the truth, till the moon was rising

and gliding over the rooftops of Brooklyn, out over

the wooden water-towers of Manhattan, I loved

them, those stalwart minarets of the only true religion,

on every roof!  old wood, old water,

I wander’d off by myself,

in all that was left of the mystical, the ordinary moist

night-air that all of us, woman and man, easy could breathe,

breathe and breed and tell the truth from time to time,

I let myself be one among the ones around me,

let myself touch and be touched, and if I had a word

I gave it to you, you all around me, the ones who look’d up

and saw me standing in front of them, gibbering

and spouting my poesy, seeming to have something

of portent to tell them, some word that was in perfect

marriage between them and myself or myselves,

whoever I thought myself to be at that moment,

but instead of hearkening they would turn in silence

and smile at me and touch me lightly on the lip or the hand

and with their whole arm point tenderly upwards

saying Brother, Lover, those are just the stars.

 

 

14 March 2005

 

Note: When in 1950 I heard Norbert Wiener lecture on cybernetics and the transcendence of human intelligence, heard him in the very precincts of the Brooklyn Philosophical Society where Whitman had heard the learned astronomer in 1865, last year of the War, I knew I had to deal with Whitman’s poem I had just gotten to know, deal with coming out from the lecture, coming out into the world of the human, coming out into the stars. I thank Olivier Brossard for summoning me to fulfil an obligation I had left neglected for half a century.

 

The present text inveigles words of my own, to say my own confusions, into Whitman’s text, without changing at all the order of his words (printed here in italics). The reader is free to discard all my words, and readers who do so will be left with the pure Whitman text, fresh as ever.

and here for convenience :

 

Whitman’s Original :

 

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

by Walt Whitman

 

 

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

 

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