When everyday objects and tasks
seem to crowd into the history you live in
you can’t breathe so easily you can hardly breathe at all
the space is so used up,
when yesterday there was nothing but.
Ah, expansive America! you
must have existed. Otherwise
no Whitman.
It’s funny that America did not explode
when Whitman published Leaves of Grass,
explode with amazement and pride, but
America was busy being other
than what he thought it was and I grew up
thinking along his lines and of course now
oh well
though actually at this very moment
the trees are acting exactly the way they did
when he walked through and among them,
one of the roughs, as he put it,
though how rough I don’t know I think
he was just carried away
as we all are, if we’re lucky
enough to have just walking
buoy us up a little off the earth
to be more on it
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