Nerve
In the next scene Walt Whitman
is walking around Boston
Common. He’s young.
It’s winter. Emerson
is there. They walk
and talk for hours, or really
Emerson talks. He scolds
Whitman for slavering
after tree knots and bobbing
with the swimmer. Whitman nods
but in his head he’s busy
tallying his orgasms.
At the carousel
an ancient Puritan is passing
his hat, singing, “Kill It Babe.”
Dozens of geese have gathered
on the frozen pond,
standing on one leg,
tucking the other like a dagger
into their feathery centers.
Well, Emerson asks the poet,
what do you have to say for yourself?
And Whitman, respectfully,
but sure now
all the way down in his bones
where the deep, frontier feeling
of disobedience lives, says,
essentially, go fuck yourself.
I’ll go my own way.
Copyright Credit: Geoffrey Hilsabeck, "Nerve." Copyright © 2019 by Geoffrey Hilsabeck. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow.
Source: PoetryNow (2019)