Walt to Emily
O Emily, anomaly, you sing There is no frigate like a book,
And, Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea!
Please climb aboard the good ship Whitman. . . .set sail
From home. . . . Song of Myself your chart and sextant.
Though recluse you have, methinks, imagined Wild nights!
In roiling seas. . . .When your life had stood a loaded gun?
Discharge! Load your lungs with earth and sun to yelp and yawp
Of cherished freedoms. . . . shoot truth straight, not slant!
You survey what I see, my macroscopic views. . . . beneath
Your microscopic lens! My ocean is your dusty pond. . . .
Is that gaze a squint?
Closer I approach you, Em. . . .breathing into, warming ears,
teasing, whispering, “With widened eyes, you’d see the oceanic
swells and surges. . . .feel Spirit pulsing, pummeling our senses.”
Ah, you note my eight and twenty bathers, men and women. Are you,
Sweet Emily-of-empathy, the twenty-ninth? Splashing, frolicking
Intermingling limbs with us. . . .but dry behind your cabin’s porthole?
Dive! Brave the floods of flesh. . . . waves of blood, currents of souls,
Submerge, merge, emerge. . . .See that my craft, like yours, is true.
Hear me. Dive in and play.
I will exult in you. . . .
from Amsterdam Quarterly and later in Ghost Trees
per his 1855, first edition, using ellipsis throughout
__________________
Ralph
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