So I'm going to end with a few poems that
are part of a series called "The Caleb and Zanna Letters."
And the trigger for the series is a line from a letter
that Whitman wrote to John Addington Symonds in 1890.
Symonds had praised Whitman for what Symonds
took to be the rather candid admission
of a homoerotic impulse driving Whitman's poetry,
and Whitman in one of his more disingenuous moments
wrote back saying, "No.
No, that's not what I meant at all."
Even trying to pass himself off as something of a ladies' man.
The line that serves as an epigraph for the series
goes, this is Whitman--
"Though always unmarried I have had six children--
two are dead, one living southern grandchild, fine boy,
who writes to me occasionally."
It's such a weird thing for Whitman to say.
I'll read it again.
"Though always unmarried I have had six children--
two are dead, one living southern grandchild, fine boy,
who writes to me occasionally."
So I've written a number of poems
in the voice of that living southern grandchild whom
I called Caleb.
And Caleb is kind of a lost soul.
He travels for three years between 1889 and 1892
around the US with his girlfriend, Susanna whom he
calls Zanna, and his dog Smoke.
They begin in Hephzibah, Georgia, which is Zanna's home,
and make their way through the South and Midwest,
finally arriving at Camden or at least,
Caleb and Smoke arrive in Camden,
three months after Whitman dies.
Missed connections are the rule.
I'll read two early ones and two late ones.
This first one is called "Hephzibah Cemetery,
April 1889."
I felt obligated to read it because it's-- the flyers take
a little chunk from it.
"Hephzibah Cemetery, April 1889."
Hephzibah means my delight is in thee, but delight is gone,
Walt, the light's been snuffed by the rain clouds.
The headstones warp open, they're plundered by snakes.
Zanna half-saves them with chalk rubbings.
Why come to Hephzibah? the magnolias
moan, with their sickly sweet blossoms I taste in my sleep.
Why spread dumbstruck ashes at the creek's fat mouth?
Why do anything, Walt?
It's a direct question.
Zanna sends you love she doesn't have to spare,
and decorates our tent with epitaphs.
Dead forever, reads her grandmom's.
Sadly, I'm lying.
Write me some way to recast this sky,
rub the clouds to blue slate, wring pulp from the sun.
Let jackdows be mourning doves, let mourning be delight,
let ashes be snow, dust sweet enough to eat.
Make me take back the comment, no love despair.
Zanna is a copperhead angel, a sage-mouthed blossom,
something to press against in the rain.
Wrecked, moored in Georgia, Caleb.
"Natchez, December 1889."
We've camped for a week under a black cottonwood.
Colors are unraveling, Walt, growing
phantom deep like the river, which is raw silver, icy silt,
a boy died in it.
We got here the day the sternwheeler sank,
we saw the flag officer frantic, we saw mud-skinned men drop
nets as the sun set over the staggered bluffs--
there was nothing to do, we turned away.
All week, Smoke's lolled in the cottonwood's gloom, a river
god guarding Zanna from the rip current.
Or I'm wishing this, Walt, because the nights are
the same, because Zanna pours the water of the drowned boy
down her shoulders and I lick it off her body
in the bone-white moonlight.
Adrift in Mississippi, Caleb.
You know, a whole lot of stuff happens,
and it becomes Chicago, June 1891.
So a year and a half passes between these two poems.
Things are not going well.
Caleb has taken a job with the World's Columbian Exposition,
which is better remembered as the Chicago World's Fair.
A few notes about this poem-- the White City
was the nickname for The Fairgrounds because
of all the bizarre architecture at The Fairgrounds center.
The Exposition saw the construction
of the first Ferris wheel, that shows up in the poem.
A masher is a guy you wouldn't want hanging around
your girlfriend, and forty-rod whiskey
is whiskey powerful enough to throw a man forty rods, which
I take it as a waste.
So, "Chicago, June 1891."
I wrote you a long letter last week,
then threw it in the lake.
It ended, Your optimism is wrong, it alone sustains me.
We're sharing a Van Buren shanty with a masher named
Carl, who fingers forty-rod whiskey and scones
from wholesale houses.
Zanna went with him and stole a ham--
a seven pound ham, Walt, stuffed in her coat.
Each morning, I tramp to Jackson Park.
lug girders with six thousand workers.
A wheel's going up--
it'll eat the sky, it'll laugh and spit
corpses on the lakefront.
I come home at night and find Zanna drunk.
Carl is eating codfish in a corner.
The Exposition lamps leave our eyes burning--
I clutch smoke, I know that wheel with crash.
Bedraggled in the White City, Caleb.
This is "Camden, June 1892," and this is
the final poem in the series.
Whitman died in March of 1892 in his Camden row
house on Mickle Street.
When Caleb and Smoke arrive in June,
one of Whitman's caretakers would still
have been there with a dog named Watch.
What else.
This poem borrows liberally from the last chant
of "Song of Myself"--
look for me under your boot-soles, things like that.
"Camden, June 1892."
This is the letter no one will see.
This is me in your house, Walt--
thirty blocks from your grave.
This is six in the evening, Mickle Street light, Smoke
and Watch raving like syphilitics in the yard.
This is my heartbreak coda, my withered Why?,
my stormy yawp, my deluge off the Delaware.
I can tell you two things--
one, Zanna gone isn't Zanna canceled, and two,
I have no boots.
I've worn them through.
You understand the problem.
In a dream, you, Zanna, Smoke, and I floated over this city.
You read us poems.
I've never properly told you what a great poet
I think you are.
Beneath us, men fixed bicycles and drank steam beer.
Women brought the sun up.
We watched this, Walt, in untranslatable wonder.
Packing my bags before the appraisers come, Caleb.