From the Archives : Whitmania (2014)

First edition of Leaves of Grass, self-published by Walt Whitman in 1855. I originally wrote this poem in German sometime around 2010 or '11 as part of a larger series, and then translated it into English in 2014. The series in question was a kind of exercise in playing with language, and that can still be seen at some places in the English translation. Beyond that, the original poem was inspired by reading about a legend of sorts that Walt Whitman, pacing on the sand of Wallabout Bay in his youth, once found a femur bone sticking out of the sand (I have not been able to find any mention of this "legend" anywhere since). Nevertheless, Wallabout Bay (which is now occupied by the Brooklyn Naval Yard) was where several British prison ships had laid anchor during the Revolutionary War after their occupation of the region around New York City. The conditions on the ships were brutal, and up to over 10,000 Revolutionary soldiers are thought to have perished in captivity on the ships. Their bodies were simply thrown overboard, and it was a common occurrence to find human remains washed ashore on the lower banks of the East River well up until the end of the 19th Century. These remains are kept in an ossuary housed beneath the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn. Since I could not establish the veracity of the legend as it stuck in my memory, I decided to make the reference in the first line a little more ambiguous, but it seems to me now that I've made a composite figure of Hart Crane and Walt Whitman. Currently, I'm contemplating whether this poem should be expanded, or form the motivating crux of a new poem sequence regarding those two figures. 

Bones of mates gone overboard he found youthlong

woven at surf's end, sown and sticking out of the sand

like barnacled rods, the clefs of songs as yet unsung

Wallabout Bayside of the holy ship-broken East River.

Grass pokes and earth spills from the words of the title

pressed into the binding, spared the poet's name

with nothing but the creased rot of leather to cover

the pages that sadly touch each other, unable to sleep.

Our reading is a yellowing no campanion will comfort

as we dig our way down. As we bury and tuck ourselves in.