Dazzling

Responding to Walt

It's too late for Whitman.
Nothing can help me now,
not even a refill. I am hundreds of words
behind, and too cynical to care
when lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d.

O typewriter, you clatter too loud
for half past two! The mocking moon
in its silent sky knows
that the due date looms;
desperate, my thesis limps
on my wilted Leaves of Grass,
and the bed will have me soon.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love .

Walt's pompous apostrophe
gets up my tired nose.
At nineteen, I am wise
beyond papers, too worldly
for Whitman. I write,
and measure the words;
these are the dark ages.

O spring, you are a rerun!
A metonymic flower,
a discouraged sun,
a death, a dead president
of a world not touched by me:
O cavernous yawn!
O rolling eye, O paper,
unfinished, wrong, unclear -

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
Less than great, and no star,
and late, I droop over paragraphs
in this last, retreating night.

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green .

I do not fight the vision.
A million variations swim and buckle.
Empty houses with their hearts
flowering perennial, blue and green.

O Walt, I have faltered to conclude.
The first hard bird is calling
and my cynic's eye exhausted
as I scrawl my second thousandth word.

I am finished.
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.



Note: The text in italics is taken from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass - when lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d