And sometimes, I try to think about the great people I love.
Walt Whitman being one of them.
And Whitman seems to see such a shine perishing Republic,
Robinson Jeffers says in one of the alternative versions
of the national anthem.
But lately, I've begun to think that it's a great surprise to me
that Pat Buchanan does not carry the state of Arizona.
I don't have this view.
I love Whitman so much.
But he seemed to feel so good about people
as though they were primarily sexual.
And it seems that people would be fine
if they were just sexual.
They have to go and have ideas.
And I'm one of them too.
For a while, I lived in North Alabama
after I got out of graduate school.
And I really didn't realize where I was living.
And I was going into town one day.
And I saw this Ku Klux Klan meeting.
And it wasn't a small meeting.
It suggested that many of my neighbors
perhaps were members of the Klan.
And I started thinking about Whitman.
And just in relationship to this.
I was feeling very depressed about this I guess.
Moment of Whitman.
Coming down Sand Mountain, many things moved with me in the car.
Cosmic aphasia after a spat.
A staticky Jonathan Winters tape.
The best of the Rolling Stones.
And then I saw them hatless, ungoverned,
decamping from the church.
A thread that flared the rope and sprawled across the parking
lot and nodded under trees.
The bald and freshly permed.
Many with dark coats and red ties or matching purses
and shoes.
Innocuous farmers with their retinues
of fledgling weightlifters.
Maiden aunts of philosophy students.
Ex coaches of insurance salesmen and guidance counselors.
Architects plotting the aesthetics
of Alabama Savings and Loans.
Great flock-- femmes fatales, trailing the mountainous sexual
wonder of 16-year-old boys.
Walt Whitman, snow jobber and cataloger of American dreams.
Demographer of miracles.
There was just that instant there.
I boiled them in one glimpse and thought
they'd maybe caucused for a wedding or a death.
Or did they love the Lord so much,
they'd come on Sunday, Wednesday, and now again
on Friday afternoon.
And some of these, too, I guessed, had formed the mob
I'd seen Saturday two weeks before that
looked so magisterial, stentorian, Greek, as it
uncoiled in a stark festoon of white sheets
and dunce's peaks towards some vitriolic welder's speech
against Earl Warren, Satan, the communists, the niggers,
and the Jews.
Distinguish them singly or mark them in the curve
where they began to blur and fade along
the Piedmont of fescue, anguses, and machines.
Were these the faces you cheered westward in numinous bodies
yet unpublished in the secret pages of the grass?
Or does the flying vision always fracture on closer inspection
of the part?
Another mile of farms, the mountain sank to hills.
A sorghum mill, a spotted mule.
And then emblazoned on a barn, a painting of a waterfall, where
later I would stop and grip the rail
and watch the violent white transfiguring
stalk of water that seemed to rear as it drove down
and shattered on the rocks and clarified
beyond in many little streams that muddled on
and vanished in the trees.
And just that way, I thought that death
might settle into things.
And still, father of joy and understanding, I did not leap.
I stood there glowing under the patient faces of the leaves.