The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

  How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

  What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

  All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,

  Else it were time lost listening to me.

  I do not snivel that snivel the world over,

  That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.

  Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity, goes to the fourth-remov’d,

  I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.

  Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

  Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,

  I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

  In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,

  And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

  I know I am solid and sound,

  To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

  All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

  I know I am deathless,

  I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,

  I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

  I know I am august,

  I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,

  I see that the elementary laws never apologize,

  (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)

  I exist as I am, this is enough,

  If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

  And if each and all be aware I sit content.

  One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,

  And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,

  I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

  My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,

  I laugh at what you call dissolution,

  And I know the amplitude of time.

  21

  I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,

  The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,

  The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.

  I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,

  And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,

  And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

  I chant the chant of dilation or pride,

  We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,

  I show that size is only development.

  Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?

  It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.

  I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,

  I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

  Press close bare-bosom’d night – press close magnetic nourishing night!

  Night of south winds – night of the large few stars!

  Still nodding night – mad naked summer night

  Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!

  Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!

  Earth of departed sunset – earth of the mountains misty-topt!

  Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!

  Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!

  Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!

  Far-swooping elbow’d earth – rich apple-blossom’d earth!

  Smile, for your lover comes.

  Prodigal, you have given me love – therefore I to you give love!

  O unspeakable passionate love.

  22

  You sea! I resign myself to you also – I guess what you mean,

  I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,

  I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,

  We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,

  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,

  Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

  Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,

  Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,

  Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,

  Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,

  I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

  Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,

  Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.

  I am he attesting sympathy,

  (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)

  I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.

  What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?

  Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,

  My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,

  I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

  Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?

  Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?

  I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,

  Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,

  Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

  This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,

  There is no better than it and now.

  What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,

  The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.

  23

  Endless unfolding of words of ages!

  And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.

  A word of the faith that never balks,

  Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.

  It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,

  That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.

  I accept Reality and dare not question it,

  Materialism first and last imbuing.

  Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!

  Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,

  This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches,

  These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,

  This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.

  Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!

  Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,

  I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.

  Less the reminders of properties told my words,

  And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,

  And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt,

  And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.

  24

  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

  No more modest than immodest.

  Unscrew the locks from the doors!

  Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

  Whoever degrades another degrades me,

  And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

  Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.

  I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,

  By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have t
heir counterpart of on the same terms.

  Through me many long dumb voices,

  Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

  Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

  Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

  And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,

  And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

  Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

  Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

  Through me forbidden voices,

  Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,

  Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

  I do not press my fingers across my mouth,

  I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

  Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

  I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

  Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

  Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,

  The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

  This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

  If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it,

  Translucent mould of me it shall be you!

  Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

  Firm masculine colter it shall be you!

  Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!

  You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!

  Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!

  My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!

  Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!

  Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!

  Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!

  Sun so generous it shall be you!

  Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!

  You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!

  Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!

  Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!

  Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.

  I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,

  Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,

  I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,

  Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.

  That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,

  A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books

  To behold the day-break!

  The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,

  The air tastes good to my palate.

  Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising, freshly exuding,

  Scooting obliquely high and low.

  Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,

  Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

  The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,

  The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,

  The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

  25

  Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

  If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

  We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,

  We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the day-break.

  My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,

  With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

  Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,

  It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,

  Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?

  Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,

  Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?

  Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,

  The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,

  I underlying causes to balance them at last,

  My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,

  Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)

  My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,

  Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,

  I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.

  Writing and talk do not prove me,

  I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,

  With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

  26

  Now I will do nothing but listen,

  To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

  I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,

  I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

  I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

  Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

  Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of workpeople at their meals,

  The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,

  The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,

  The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,

  The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,

  The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

  The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,

  (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

  I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)

  I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

  It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

  I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,

  Ah this indeed is music – this suits me.

  A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,

  The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

  I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)

  The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

  It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,

  It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,

  I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,

  Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,

  At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

  And that we call Being.

  27

  To be in any form, what is that?

  (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)

  If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.

  Mine is no callous shell,

  I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

  They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

  I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

  To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

  28

  Is this
then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,

  Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,

  Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,

  My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself,

  On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,

  Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,

  Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,

  Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,

  Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,

  Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasturefields,

  Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,

  They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,

  No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,

  Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,

  Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

  The sentries desert every other part of me,

  They have left me helpless to a red marauder,

  They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

  I am given up by traitors,

  I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,

  I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

  You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,

  Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

  29

  Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!

  Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

  Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,

  Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

  Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,

  Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

  30

  All truths wait in all things,

  They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

  They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

  The insignificant is as big to me as any,

  (What is less or more than a’touch?)

  Logic and sermons never convince,

  The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

  (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,

  Only what nobody denies is so.)

  A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,

  I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,

  And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,

  And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,

  And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,