America the Beautiful & Walt Whitman & Larry Levis

Whitman:     

   “I say we had better look our nation searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease.” -Democratic Vistas

“Look for me under your bootsoles.”

On Long Island, they moved my clapboard house

Across a turnpike, & then felt so guilty they

Named a shopping center after me!

Now that I’m required reading in your high schools,

Teenagers call me a fool.

Now what I sang stops breathing.

And yet

It was only when everyone stopped believing in me

That I began to live again—

First in the thin whine of Montana fence wire,

Then in the transparent, cast-off garments hung

In the windows of the poorest families,

Then in the glad music of Charlie Parker.

At time now,

I even come back to watch you

From the eyes of a taciturn boy at Malibu.

Across the counter at the beach concession stand,

I see you hot dogs, Pepsis, cigarettes-

My blond hair long, greasy, & swept back

In a vain old ducktail, deliciously

Out of style. And no one notices.

Once I even came back as me,

An aging homosexual who the Tilt-a-Whirl

At county fairs, the chilled paint on each gondola

Changing color as it picked up speed,

And a Mardi Gras tattoo on my left shoulder.

A few of you must have seen my photographs,

For when I looked back,

I thought you caught the meaning of my stare:

Still water,

Merciless.

A Kosmos. One of the roughs.

And Charlie Parker’s grave outside Kansas City

Covered with weeds.

Leave me alone.

A father who’s outlived his only child.

To find me now will cost you everything.

-Larry Levis, from his collection "Winter Stars"