Wildflowers

for Joseph Cady Camden, 1882 Is it raining, Mary, can you see? I hear rain. Is the road black, is it shining? Dark, I can see for myself. Put on my red tie, red has life in it—most men I know dress like undertakers making sure they look mournful enough to manage their own funerals No accounting for taste: we should be grateful for that. Help me get to the window, I want to see Mickle Street. Don’t you hear it now, something like rain, off in the distance? My ear, maybe, is playing me tricks again; there was a rushing, like rain when it moves closer and starts a millstream in the trees. No? I guess my senses must be losing their touch. It was nothing. then, nothing more than a tantrum of the boneyard: best for me to hold still in this chair and listen to my beard grow. Now if hair was poetry, then your Walt Whitman would be a great success. I wear out trying to come to terms with the wrong weather— what you might call speaking terms. I don’t want to talk to much else. You tell them to go home, Mary, no visitors today—or one, just one: what else is a red tie for? Some English poet, keeps me up, coming all the way here from California, Colorado—coming to ask the usual questions. I don’t like questions that require answers: English questions. That’s a country of things answered. London is a city of things done with. Brooklyn is different, New Orleans, Washington they’re my cities of romance, all the cities of things begun. I may have been deliberate, even laborious, but I never looked for finish. Here, where’s his name? Bucke wrote about him after hearing one of his lectures. I had it somewhere. You let him in, Mary: no one else, no one ... I’m slipping—here it is, here’s the name!— slowly, maybe, but slipping. Who can say he has hold of what might be called a standing? That’s what they do say, though, all these visitors— they write, they call, and they stay: it makes a problem Doctor says: bar them. I can’t. I won’t. Still, they bother me. One young fellow walks in, says, “Walt, I should like to read you my epic and have your opinion of its worth.” “Thank you,” say I, “but I’ve been paralyzed once already.” Suppose someone took it in his head to come and sit here and say nothing! someone who knows even the first syllables of the great speech of silence ... Today’s visitor, maybe, will mind his tongue, maybe spare you the trouble of putting his latest tribute on the shelf with all the rest. Give me enemies rather than these disciples of mine. Best thing I ever heard of Browning is how he disapproves of all those Societies. Not that I quote Browning, or care for him, or read him: I’ve tried Browning on every way, but he don’t fit. Tennyson— now he has his place, a local English place: I don’t see how the world could make much use of him elsewhere— but the others: I conclude most literature was written on all fours, and the rest on stilts! ... There, Mary, the bell. I did hear that! I know my own bell, don’t I? Go on, go on down, bring the man up ... In here, Mr. Wilde. This room is not such a ruin as it seems: I find most things I search for without much trouble— found Dr. Bucke’s letter with your name, for instance. Found my red necktie as well. Come in, you cast a shadow where you stand. Come in, the chaos is more suspected than real. I suspect no chaos: I am convinced of the cosmos in your company, Walt Whitman! I greet you, sir, as America’s great voice.