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.”

Walt’s Brain

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