Fowler And Welles’ Phrenological
Cabinet
Walt Whitman
made regular visits.
He
loved to touch the white porcelain head,
marked
off in sections: Appetite, Grief,
Acquisitiveness.
Like a butcher’s chart
mapping
the choicest meats.
Whitman
knew the body’s limits,
and
how the mind, a grid
of
memory and fear, narrows the range
even further.
He hated limits,
prudence,
high manners,
but
he loved a good system
and
wanted to learn this one’s
steady
answers. Why wouldn’t
what’s
inside show up on the skin?
The
bumps of the head,
small
ones like hiccups,
large ones
that span three or four
categories,
elongated heads, ones
that
come to a point. His categories
would
need new names:
Voluptuousness
wears an open collar,
Indolence
takes the shape
of
a cardboard butterfly perched
on
his finger. Adhesiveness wants a walk
on the
dark docks, a ferry ride across a river.
And
Sublimity roars like a leaf.
His
home in Camden,
where
I touch his rubber galoshes,
once overflowed
with stacks of paper,
a
chaos, a fire hazard.
He
wouldn’t let the hired woman touch it.
Whitman
claimed an internal logic
even to
Disorder; he loved
a
good system. In the prison
across
the street from his house, men line the windows.
Women
on the sidewalk dance, arms above their heads,
hold a
pose like Cleopatra, then change.
I
thought at first: performance art?
Then
realized they were spelling
with
their bodies, forming the vowels
and the
consonants in the air.
The
body’s news comes slowly.
Whitman
knew about longing,
he
nursed dying Civil War soldiers,
knew the
stink of rotting flesh,
of
pus staining a bandage yellow,
the
angel face we wear when we’re asleep.
He
was large in Sympathy.
He knew
something of fate
and
its strange journey through the grey
thickets
of Infelicity and Melancholia,
the
temperaments that form in the womb.
—Kim
Roberts
-----------
The
Apparition
Walt Whitman
is popping up everywhere.
He
came to Barbara in a dream
and drew
her out of her classroom,
he
was clean-shaven and vulnerable,
like a
boy, and he taught her
everything
to know about climbing trees.
He came
to Lisa in a vision,
a
flash of angelic light
atop a
bridge; he told her,
open
yourself to you mystical nature,
be
not afraid of the part of you
inexplicable and unexplained.
To me he
comes as Gemini,
duality
that seeks
its own
reconciliation.
Divided
and paradoxical,
using his
book to knit together
one
life, one accord
from two
dissonant halves,
Walt
steps down from my bookshelves.
I am reading
now of Castor and Pollux,
sons
of Leda, twins, although—
biology
be damned—
sired
of two fathers.
When one
twin is in heaven,
the
other is on earth. Then they switch.
Each is
always wondering
if
he is only half a man,
and only
half good enough.
Doubt
is part of the doubleness.
But that
is Walt’s gift:
the
striving for wholeness
on every
page. That’s his lesson.
And
who knows
where he
will next appear,
or
in what form.
—
Kim Roberts
-----------
Walt
Whitman
Walt
Whitman
Walt
Whitman walks through every door:
He
enters and departs, arrives
By
the same light
Ringing
the summit
As
the far shore.
For
where he steps
In
a leaf’s wake,
The
leaf is once more…
Now,
O now America, let love, the poor ragpicker,
Come
in.
Try
on his old raiments like new.
—Alan
Botsford Saitoh
-----------
How
I Manage
What is
right for you is not right for me.
I translate you. I name you. I pity your sleep
in an empty eye, no shelter, no patience, no time.
I
stay alert, as if our love were swordplay
and I could kill you, if I tried. Instead,
I say and do the things that are too hard for you.
I dance, make you look good,
and then I leave backwards
as if marking a trail
to ease your going.
Your time shortens
more quickly than mine.
Soon you will leave, and I work now
to make that leaving easy.
I'll patch wounds later with the crust of repetition,
but for now it is enough that you do not see me grieve.
—Zoe
Forney
-----------
Turn
of the Year
September
10
Old upright
piano
without
a bench
but
in good tune.
View
of the blue bridge,
and
of several trees
that
will turn yellow
as
the weeks go by.
The
days seem old, too,
tuned
by the repetition
of
season and purpose.
Classroom,
teacher, students
who
do, don't, will, won't.
Threat
and promise
of
autumn.
September
12
Sky too
blue,
sun
too bright.
Flowers
on my table, mustard
zinnias
and red carnations,
colors
leaking into the air.
The
lake is still,
until a
fish leaps.
Go
back, fish.
This
is not your element,
no
heaven. He falls, ripples
curling
the water a long time,
right
to my feet.
—Zoe
Forney
-----------
Chaos
It was
quiet. West Philadelphia,
a
good many years ago. Morning noises, the hail
of
delivery man to grocer as bread stacked up,
wrapped
in paper, a few deeper loaves
remembering
a little warmth. Just then
a
sinkhole opened and swallowed the bakery truck,
while
the driver clung, staring, to the store's
doorjamb
and the grocer's boy cried out,
"Did
you see! Oh Lord above us, did you see!"
Some things
happen suddenly. No thought.
No
imagination of what might be if. Nothing.
Yet
they happen, like a penance of some kind, visited
on
the wrong person, the one to whom it never occurred
that
air might not hold the great steel bird high enough,
to
whom it makes no sense that the gargoyle should ungrip
and
knock a loiterer into the grave, to whom chaos is
something
to fight against as against death itself.
The sand
is coarser than I remember, shifts
when
I least expect it, as if there were tunnels
underfoot,
or sponge. I find my bearings
only
once I’m in the water, where the sun
lights
shallow waves I'm in up to my knees.
There’s
a violet mist across the harbor now,
so
I can only almost see Manhattan, a shining cube
here,
there, but indistinct, like my thoughts about it:
insistent,
elusive, half reasoned, missing parts.
This is
a colder world, but just as clear.
Emptied
sky, but just as capable of blue.
Clocks
just as cruel, trains just as fast, men just as tall,
chaos
just as sweet and dark and tempting as always.
What
changes is the way we look at each other,
silence
ourselves, draw blame, feed squirrels,
embrace
in public, or flinch when the next plane
flies
overhead, remembering inside. What changes
is
how we elect, every day now, to openly
face
the arbitrary, or choose to crawl.
—Zoe
Forney
-----------
Walt's
Brain
|
Walt Whitman died the
evening of March 26, 1892. The next day, according to
Justin Kaplan in Walt Whitman: A Life, "Thomas Eakins
and a pupil made a death mask. Whitman's literary executors,
Traubel, Bucke, and Harned, took possession of his papers
and packed them into barrels. George Whitman [the poet's
brother] refused to allow the autopsy; the doctors waited
until he left the house that afternoon and then went ahead
with their work, discovering that the immediate cause
of death was pulmonary emphysema; the left lung had collapsed
entirely, and the right was only fractionally functional.
The doctors removed his brain and sent it to be measured
and weighed at the American Anthropometric Society, where
it was destroyed when a laboratory worker accidentally
dropped it on the floor."
|
But where
is what I started for, so long ago
And why is it yet unfound?
Walt Whitman
Snowdrops,
witch hazel and crocus peep
through the basement window at the stiffening brain
fresh from the trepanned skull,
cradled torpid and pensive in the distant, polished oak coffin.
In bluntlight,
the lab worker's formaldehyded hands,
briefly brainwashed,
caress the furrows of good gray matter.
Far away, the carcass trembles as the lab worker muses:
old ones
always go just as spring comes in
Just as
in life,
Walt's brain bucks, slips through the fingers,
winks and twinkles among the glass chards,
softly sighing as his mind sap
flows and ebbs in a childish gawk..
what
do you do with a dropped brain
the
lab worker wonders,
but by now,
synapses sputter and crackle like downed telegraph lines;
medulla, pantbreathing,
loafs behind dust balls and life stains;
cerebellum scrounges the yellowed tile for fourth-month grass.
Charged
with an electric dreamstorm,
Walt's corpus callosum ruptures in blue fireball,
his cerebrum unlooses the forebrain to foreplay,
and the quivering brain-halves quest for opposing floor crannies,
In the light corner, blabbing syntax, splitting and naming
like a young Adam, the left-brain
scans tenon and mortise for knotty warts.
And in
the dark corner, embracing eidolons,
Walt's sauntering right-brain
mutely carols the lab worker's facial aurora.
Quicklight, the saucy hemispheres
swell with lilac and yawp,
seeding crooned spirals of starlit compost
across the teetering beakers.
going to
my grave with this
shrieks
the lab worker as he scampers after the sparking brains
Nodding
sagely, the snowdrops, witch hazel and crocus warble
in the float of the Walt-chant
thrumming against the basement window:
earth me
water me earth me water me
—Phil
Dansdill
-----------
