I don’t think you have met Mr. Whitman’s poem let me introduce him to you.

I don’t think you have met Mr. Whitman’s poem let me introduce him to you.

First forget everything you learned at school and just imagine you, yourself are Walt Whitman’s poem – the big poem, the one that contains and encompasses EVERYTHING and EVERYONE and ALL TIME. You are full of lists of everything. “Work-box, chest, string’d instrument, boat, frame, and what not,”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You are full of Walt Whitman, “The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You are constantly in contradiction and constantly resolving your contradictions.  You are here and now and then: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem and you are and always have been waiting for you to read you, “I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You have been waiting for you to hear your rhythms, your cadences, “you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”