SEVENTEEN

THE STRONG AND DELICIOUS WORD

You wouldn’t know, until you drive in a ways, that the gates of Harleigh Cemetery open onto rolling, hilly land, where many graveled roads curve off from the main stem, inviting confusion. If you want to find the tomb of Walt Whitman, you’re on your own; there’s no sign to mark the way. Perhaps Camden, New Jersey, fears the poet’s grave might be a hangout for bohemians and the unruly, though more likely this battered community just has other priorities.

Down a hill to the left, there’s a small valley, a dip obscured by trees and the bulks of old tombs. Whitman’s monument is there, in a buggy, moody place, and behind it, on a ridge thick with scrappy trees, rise the terraced levels of an art deco hospital built some forty years later. The tomb stands by itself; the only adjacent headstone appears to have toppled years ago. The monument was scooped into the side of the slope, and constructed of just a few very large pieces of brooding, bluish granite. The open door feels like the entrance to a cave.

Door isn’t quite the right word: the unimaginably heavy plinth of stone is set so that it seems ajar. (You there—I here . . .) A padlocked iron gate blocks the way in, grillwork decorated by a scrap of faded plastic flowers, but through the opening you can see a wall of granite, and six flat marble rectangles marking where at least some of the Whitmans lie, in this order:

LOUISA	GEORGE	EDWARD
LOUISA SR.	WALT	WALTER

Thus Walt himself lies beneath his sister-in-law Louisa, his war-hero brother, and his mentally disabled brother Eddie, to whom he left a good deal of the proceeds of his estate, though Eddie died later the same year Walt did. He is between his parents, Louisa and Walter, whose bodies he had moved here from their original resting places on Long Island.

Whitman was offered a plot in the cemetery the year it opened, 1889, in exchange for a poem about the place. He picked out the spot himself, and set to fund-raising for the tomb, but never delivered the poem. The structure he designed cost four thousand dollars in 1891, nearly double—as biographer Jerome Loving points out—what he had paid for his house. Stand back to take in the monumental granite top-piece and you can easily see why: that huge triangular stone must have cost the earth to transport. It makes the whole structure vaguely Greek, vaguely gothic, and distinctly pressed down toward the earth. At its center, chiseled in blunt lettering, WALT WHITMAN. The poet has subsumed the other Whitmans buried here, or perhaps it’s more fair to say that he has surrounded himself for the voyage with chosen company.

What did he think of the tomb? When he visited the site to view the work in progress, his housekeeper Mary Davis wrote, “Mr. Whitman won’t be paler when he is dead than he was when he had alighted from the carriage and down into the tomb. He leaned up against the wall . . .” Whatever the case, the funeral itself, in March 1892, was a ceremonious affair. Spectators lined Haddonfield Road; a big tent was erected near the grave (where would they have put it? perhaps the ornamental pond with its somewhat casino-ish jet of water is a later addition to the scene). There were speeches. It was an event of a piece with the expansive civic mood of the day. A strand of boosterism, with its optimistic fellowship of developers, entrepreneurs, and opportunists, is the external side of Whitman’s fervent embrace of American energies. Perhaps the love of comrades, the affectionate company of fellow spirits making home and love in the wilderness, is, in its basest form, the Camden Rotary.

Peter Doyle, the DC streetcar conductor Whitman called his “tenderest Lover,” stood at a distance during it all, up on the slope away from everyone. Doyle said he never really liked Whitman’s literary friends. His presence haunts descriptions of the event, and perhaps shades the tomb itself. John Burroughs, a naturalist who was a friend and admirer of Whitman, described Doyle “up the hill, twirling a switch in his hand, his tall figure and big soft hat impressively set against the white-blue sky.” What to do, if you were nervous, and felt unwelcome, or wanted to look on and yet set yourself apart from the hoopla and speeches? Twirl a stick.

A modern stone installed a few feet in front of the tomb seems a similar gesture. The slick black granite’s inscribed with a passage from the end of “Song of Myself”:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

Whoever ordered those lines etched in stone, their text now partly worn away after only thirty or forty years, must have been aware that Whitman’s flesh has been bequeathed to nothing; it is crypted where no grass takes root. Of his bodily organs, only the brain isn’t interred here; being “abnormally large,” it was removed for study at the American Anthropometric Society. The organ is said to have been dropped there by a clumsy lab assistant, and destroyed.

If you want me again look under your bootsoles. Does whoever selected the text for this monument mean to tell us not to bother to seek here? Should I abandon this pilgrimage? Many others, of course, have made it too. Some evidence of their passing is the only cheering thing in sight: bits of graffiti knifed onto the bark of birches: MAE + LOUISE and I LOVE YOU WALT.

AM I ANNOYED with Walt Whitman for having a tomb? It seems an emblem of the public self, that side of Whitman’s character that sought attention and approbation, and led him to do harm to his own work through too eager an embrace of externals. Because he—along with Emily Dickinson—wrote the most courageous American poems of their century, I rail against his attempts to turn outward and write crowd-pleasing poetry.

But we tend to be hard on heroes. I might think instead of the hard truth of being close to penniless, and how welcome the income brought through the occasional honorarium, or a newspaper’s fee for a bit of timely verse. Or of the Civil War, and the years of attending to ruined bodies, an endeavor as physically challenging as it was utterly heartbreaking—particularly for one who’d once hoped that the love of comrades might be the foundation of our social order. Or think of the physical robustness of Whitman in his thirties, and the increasingly debilitating illnesses that darkened his later years, the stroke that left him unable to walk, entirely dependent on a chain of attendants.

The Whitman who dismisses mortality is the famous one; The smallest sprout shows there really is no death, he announced as he walked onto the stage of American poetry. If the self is porous and multiple, and “I” am not contained between my hat and my bootsoles but range freely across space and time, if bodies become grass, and grass becomes text, and the world’s one vast recirculating stream, what difference could individual death make?

This great gust of fresh air is countered by a certain gothic strain in Whitman, as American as those sad urns carved in shallow bas relief on early headstones, the weeping willows and winged death’s-heads of old burial grounds. For a spirit that roamed restlessly, entering into every jot of the teeming life around him, stillness must have held a deep allure. If you are everything and everywhere, how restful it must seem to be no one and nowhere.

In the nine lines of the penultimate stanza of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the word death actually appears ten times, enough to make one consider that the poet may be rather more than half “in love with easeful death” like Keats, and enough to demonstrate that he is more a brother to the grave-besotted Poe than at first appears to be the case.

My own songs awaked from that hour,

the poem’s final stanza begins,

And with them the key, the word up from the waves,

The word of the sweetest song and all songs,

That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,

(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)

The sea whispered me.

Delicious? I don’t know that I can go that far, but indeed there’s something here beyond or behind this relishing of mortality. The poet becomes himself, his songs awakened, when he understands that the world around him is saturated with death, that every single thing exists next to its disappearance. The great overarching self of Whitman’s early vision is deathless, yes, but to be everyone is to be no one in particular, and in an odd way to be everyone is to be alone, since there can be no other. When the Self dissolves into a world of separate selves and death becomes real, love becomes a pact with grief; what is gained then is the inescapably poignant fact of individuality. There will never be another you, and I love the stubborn particularity of you because you will disappear.

The elision of a preposition in that final line is a poeticism, of course; we understand that Whitman means that the sea whispered its single word, repeated incessantly here, to me. But because he does not inscribe the word to, he places a parallel meaning beside the first. The sea whispered me can be read to mean I am that word the water repeats.

WHEN I PICK UP the phone there’s that outer-space sound of static, and Alex says, I’m all right. We have been together for five years. We struggle, but I don’t doubt that we love each other, in our unstable, volatile bond.

All conversations that begin with I’m all right are terrible. It means, It’s not as bad as the worst thing you’re thinking, offered as a preemptive gesture of reassurance or consolation—but how can the listener help but feel paralyzed with fear as to what’s about to be said? Even though the inner mechanisms are hurrying to construct a narrative (he’s able to call, his voice sounds more-or-less all right) to forestall terror.

He says he’s had an accident, on his motorcycle. There was a deer, another car, a man stopped, the police are there now, he’s all right, can I come, can I bring a broom? His voice, threading through all that galactic static (the sound of the police radio behind him, added to the random noise of cell phone transmission?) sounds so far away I don’t want to hang up, but he says Come, I’ll tell you later, I’m all right, so I do. I am all but immobilized, though I know I have to find my shoes, a jacket, my keys, a dustpan and broom—to clean up the glass, he’d said, which made me shiver.

Then I’m driving on a road I usually love for how unlit it is, how you can take the measure of the night there, and be startled by the wide-awake presence of the stars, either as crystalline singularities or as washes of light like the place I imagine that static on the phone line came from. I remembered the dustpan but not the broom. I briefly consider going back for it and think better of it. I’m focused on trying to keep my speed down, studying every grove and cluster of trunks in my headlights for flashes thrown back from the retinae of deer; they’re restless with desire, this time of the year, on the move.

It’s never seemed farther to Town Lane Road, the slow curves through the woods that end at Deep Lane as the road straightens then crosses a big field, past the horse barn and farm stand and a still-standing skeletal row of sunflower stalks, if there were light enough to see them. Then, looping through woods, past the mailboxes of darkened houses, up ahead a way, pulsing red light, two police cars, one on either side of the road. And near one of them, looking down into the lank grass beside the asphalt for some lost thing, Alexander.

I remember the way I held my shoulders and back, as if I were creating a kind of armor in myself not unlike the rigid plastic in Alex’s jacket, which certainly saved him from much greater injury. The dense, plastic- and metal-infused cloth was torn at the elbow, the blue and silver helmet’s sparkle marred by scratches and a gouge on one side where he’d struck and slid.

He’d been riding at a blessed thirty miles per hour; a truck came toward him, headlights filling his gaze so he couldn’t see the deer just behind it, poised to spring. As the truck passed him his field of vision filled with an amber field; there was nothing in front of him but deer, featureless, a carpet of fur. And then he was separated from the bike, in the air, and here the story breaks.

His first—and characteristic—words, spoken while still prone, on the pavement, were “I’m all right,” a hypothesis tested by speaking it aloud to the air and the late crickets. It seemed to be true, primarily. He could, with effort, stand up, begin to straighten up.

The Hispanic woman driving the truck stopped, and emerged just as he was beginning to stand, to demonstrate he had come near one of the gates of this life and wound up again on this side, more or less intact. She let loose an excited cascade, in Spanish, of which Alexander caught a bit, his attention fixed mostly on the continuing project of attempting to stand upright. Even in the first of the sensation that was condensing into pain the way a film of moisture will precipitate from a cloud of mist, he had the presence of mind to be annoyed that she was talking about herself. He was aware that he was surrounded by the small pieces of shattered windshield—and what had become of the hapless deer? Knowing him as I do, I imagine this may well have been the moment when he thought to ask me to bring a broom, so that he could clean up the road.

When he asked the driver to call the police, she tucked herself swiftly back into the truck and fled. Who knows what the consequences might have been for her, if she had no Green Card, or if the responding officer might be without sympathy for her kids at home? How would you make that decision, between offering assistance to one who could at least stand and speak and the loyalties that might send you driving away? I don’t know whether or not she waited to see him stretch and move before she got out of her truck, but I am grateful to her, that she did get out, did come to his side before she sped into the night.

A few minutes later another driver called the cops, and then stayed till they arrived. By the time I got there the evidence had been examined: the nose of the bike had cut a long, deep groove into the pavement; there was a puddle of oil into which I promptly stepped, even after I’d been warned not to; the policemen helped to push the bits of glass out of the road. They looked for any sign of the deer—nothing. Had a flank or hind leg glanced off the nose of the bike? We hoped for that. We looked—nothing. The awful flashing of the red lights formed an angry cloud in my head that prohibited clear thinking. Alex seemed stunned, able to walk, slowly, bent forward, looking for something. The police wanted to go home, and in few minutes we understood that they were waiting for us to call a tow truck.

On the drive home the strength that had animated Alex to stand up, look after himself and the wreckage, look for the deer, to talk to the police and call me, ebbed away almost visibly, as in that mythological image of the great statue animated by the molten metal within until the valve at its ankle is opened, and out pours the life-force of it, as its color drains and its motion slowly comes to a halt. He didn’t want to go to the hospital. He wanted to rest. I got him up from the passenger seat, his arm over my shoulder, and he very slowly leaned and hopped his way up the driveway, up the low front steps into the cottage door, onto the edge of a chair, where he perched a few moments before he sank onto the floor, where he’d remain for hours.

It’s hard to say how much of what kept him there was physical pain. He’d been holding the body of the motorcycle between his thighs as he was torn up from it, and he’d hit the pavement at thirty miles an hour, helmet and shoulder and elbow sliding along it. But there was some other gravity as well, a sort of bruise left by the experience of nearly leaving physicality, or of knowing that he could have. He tells me the story of the accident, in detail, the story that is not a story at its center, where it becomes unstable, shot through with uncertainty, the night of Town Lane Road blowing through it.

Then his talking slows, longer pauses between phrases, and then no more phrases, though his eyes are open. Both the dogs have come to lie beside him, and curl quietly there. Ned is stretched out fully, his back fit to Alex’s belly and chest, and George has laid his smaller body beside Alex’s face. Both dogs are holding still, not asking for attention or for stroking; they seem to be playing some other part, as witness and companion. They’re doing their work. My phone’s at hand, and I use it to take some pictures of the three, the still, conjoined company. A kind of bulwark the living make.

MY OWN SONGS AWAKED from that hour, Whitman writes of the moment when the demon-bird’s lyric of grief fueled in him a poet’s vocation,

And with them the key, the word up from the waves,

The word of the sweetest song and all songs,

That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,

(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)

The sea whispered me.

In what way is death the key? Is our mortality so much the chief feature of us that who we are cannot be known without it? A gate swings partway open, now and then; we can’t really see inside it, but things as they are seem changed by the way the air around us begins to pour ahead through the door. One of us could have gone through, but here we are, warm together, quiet: Alex, Ned, even little George, lying together in the soft lamplight, on the living room floor. They seem to be floating there, above their own shadows, and at the same time the bodies seem to have taken on weight, solidified with the fact of limit. I know, the dogs want to comfort him, something they seem to take as part of their jobs in this life. But I seem to catch, in their faces as well as his, something else, as if what they were doing just now was giving active attention to being present together, in the fact of their common lot.

And my work in this life?

None of this will go unrecorded. I will see and say all of it, as clearly and deeply as I can, re-entering, lifting experience in the direction of another dimension of time, where everything I have loved can be known again, more fully, that my joy in it might increase as I take the measure of what I have lost. And my grief may increase as well; Alex and I loved each other, and held together through a troubled and volatile relation as best we could, and in a while we ended it. I truly wish him every good in this life. Sweet hell? Maybe, but so be it.