Some time ago, I undertook to write a long-form poem in tribute to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself", I've posted it in parts here and there, but I have yet to post the whole thing as I intended it. So here, as one long piece, is "Complementarity, (Or A Song of Us)"
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1
We are differing, you and I
I sing our sameness out of the swirling sky
Here is the river! Here is the discovering of life
I, the child of this song of songs,
In my 24th year, with fiery muse begin
Is it me you love?
Then you love nothing
Less than the whole cosmos
Is it my heart you have striven to reach?
Then you have reached across yourself
And within yourself
To escape yourself
Follow me a little way
And I will peel the veil
Like a ripe orange on the universe
I will show you whose heart and how
The where and when will wear out at this
The nature of things
You will not need to know when we will lose the moon
Only that it is dancing away
Until it is free in the void
2
Happy am I as I work
As sweat gleans my substantiveness
As I vanish into the toil
I am the vacuum humming as I enjoy my work
The symmetric lines are my Socrates and Sappho
Knowledge passed in the carpet
I am the plate, the fork, all cutleries am I
All feeders, all silvers, all irons, all!
This is to work
Have you earned the liquid monies of the spirit?
Have you seen your currency spent to moisten the earth beneath?
The replenishable forehead of the galaxy?
Have I not sung in the noon heat while working,
If not more, as much as in the Sunday reverie?
Have I not lent my baritone to the eternal harmony of a laboring universe?
What I have sung, youth and love, you shall sing
What I shall echo, you shall my echo ring
3
After work it begins to pour
The rain rings heavily on the rooftops
In echo of my sweat falling
In echo of my toil’s engendered fluid
The sky is sweating deeply in the night
I smell the perspiration and am invigorated
Each drop of mine a fractal brother of this
Each drop a bulbous fractal of a liquid fig
Returning the cycle as quickly as I began it
It began me long ago
It was begun long before that
All have begun again a million times
All have a million more beginnings
The rain proves this
The water which comprises it is not new to the universe
The water is comprised of antique hydrogens
Primeval oxygen
There is only so much stuff to be had
Yet there shall continually be new waters
New oceans, new seas, new tides
New men and women with original energy
And new poetry, the rain is a new poem every time
Giving the earth a new sensation every time
Breeding new tubers and roots and imaginative flowers
Feeding bees, feeding birds, feeding life
With new waters until it is time to return them
The sky is filled with new waters
Heaven’s face staring down at its produce
It is new like my face is new every morning
When I am shaved
And when my beard is full at night and dark as the blackened sky
My skin covered in rain proving
New universes from old waters every hour
The apocalyptic dance of a trillion veils of the universe
4
The light begins to dance its way through the dying rain
It begins to settle itself upon the morning
I sleep but dream the dreams of those
who busily begin about me
The jogger on his way around the green lake
the mother packing extra pudding for her child
the business minded gentility on their way to an early meeting
the baker beginning his bread, the night watchmen closing his orbit
all with a similar dream which I dream
I don’t need to describe it to you
you dream it too every sleep
And are likewise disturbed when awoken by the real sun
Which is unlike the rosy dreamscape
in which the mothers, bakers, guards, and businessmen, and you
and I are more free, more electric, and of newer stuff
Happy as in the old ages of a fairy tale
Or do your nightmares wait within your heavy eyelids?
Where only the closeness makes them more real?
What more than a veil is your eyelid? See through mine instead
and I will reveal to you what only you have truly seen
that only I have understood
5
Is my poem too long?
Then my poem is too long
The journey from me to you
Is immense and filled with freshly shifted eyes
Have you left your body behind yet?
Have you outgrown its conceits and melancholia yet?
Have you dug into my poems to dig me out into your mind’s eye?
I am imponderable there, loose in the rapidly bloviating forest
6
In the morning I begin an education
When at length I am awoken
After basking unfettered
I, Homo Naturalis
Against the stark moon
Am all alone
Companion of the stars
Likewise oscillating, differing slightly in luminance
Greatly in ancientness
And the wood whispers a vague rumor
about the city
and the city creates a susurrus about the wood
and I alone under the night sky hear them all
and see the stars with ancient, wizened faces
as they chuckle softly at the ignorance of such temporary things
7
At length I am obliged to offer help
And so I take the train at evening
and the gentleman next to me
Into my confidence
He is a teacher heading home to his wife
He loves her greatly and is buoyed by the prospect of rest
I engage him to unburden his ended day upon me
I am free and can carry the load while we pass under the cityscape
It is his passion which obliges him to unload
After he leaves the train we continue to converse
I go with him too
To his home on a quiet street
I am filled with peace as he enters the nattily attired cul-de-sac
You should have been there when I left the station!
How you would have loved the company of the workers at the docks
The salty stories told in the barely lit breakroom
I journeyed from there up by a lilac field
Where I briefly luxuriated with a friend
From which I wandered woefully towards
A park, watching the day rise with a vagrant
He watched me warily until at length I had coaxed him
I shared with him poetry and he
Shared the weary sensation of the cold nights
We sat comparing despair
As his retriever rested lazily on the dew
8
I am far from you
And am fully contained
Somewhere in the periphery of your heart
Under the sea, life whirls
In the calming algae blue
I know the fishes here and there, I know them all
They began long hours before the sunrise
They struggle like you in the ever-illuminated sea
The sea which is always dark and filled with weight
The weight gives me form and flesh
The weight of the hammerhead smashing its meal
On the abyssal plain
Or of the brain coral slowly building from the detritus
Of the rich sea
Each man dying on the lips
Of his erstwhile friends
Loses first this weight of the waters
Then his own name
Then is no more found in heaven
And is at last banished from the heart of his loved on earth
You have walked under the sea with me
You have known what is my volume here
Perhaps this then will make me lasting as I die
As I continue to live
I am under the spell of this!
As the sunrise over the sea
And where have you learned to speak of death?
And where have you reckoned the end of things to come‽
How sudden and how far off‽
Do not equivocate the miles under the sea
For days or years, they are instant
At once alive and sustaining
At once murderous and inert
9
Whose voices are these rising from the sea?
Are they refractions of the words we throw?
Are they new voices from new horizons?
Are they ancient sunken kingdoms?
Whose voice is this, coming forth without accent?
Is it an émigré who sings in this catholic timbre?
A new savage with utterly new eyes?
Is it an unsuspected familiar?
Knowing notes which were not learned in classrooms?
Whoever he is, he is loved briefly
All men take him into themselves
Even you let his spirit wash you
You welcome him from his curious journey
And hope for his tales to impart society to you
This voice is the same with which I at times speak
Not American, not of Niger, not of Samarkand
of the universe, of real
10
O! of odors! O! of perfumes!
The musky yellow of houses at dawn is mine
I love too the vacuity of the fresh atmospheric scent after lightning
I am excessively pleased with these
Even my own smell after I sweat
I feel it and am not reviled by it
For it is mine
As much as language in my mouth is mine
As much as water is mine
I, the child of futures
The father of pasts
The circuitous nephew of presence
I stretch myself against the day and measure
My voice against its voice
Being both taller and shorter
I will survive it
It does not fit me like a suit that is not mine
11
I shall explain myself in brief
I shall give you the key to unlock yourself
If you will hear it
I am a poet
I transcend myself
If I am wholesome, can I decline to write of vileness
With as much warmth, and more volume?
Can I speak of the known more than the unknown?
Can I choose half the universe as good?
And not surveil the remainder?
But none are evil among the grand unity of the kosmos!
The singularity good, and the swaddling star good
The lightning is good, and the thunder is good
And neither is less than its other
The sequence good, and the chaos is good
The logic good, and the passion good
These are for me to know nascently
These are for me to find out anew
These are the form and bones of poetry
That nothing is irreconciled to any other
I am no less the singer of epodes
Than the odes themselves
I am Homeric, Byronic, Epic
I desire poems, I desire prose
I desire the cause of languages
As though I need to speak anymore!
12
Farther away I begin to run from you!
Farther stretching myself into my work
Playing more as I am limbered
I am unfit for such a game
I do not compete
I do not measure myself against any man
I am the perfect thing
I am the proof that the next thing will be greater
If I am the meter
Then he who outstrips me proves me great
He who measures his lyric against mine renews my growth
I stretch and extend myself eternally
All poetry then‽
Walt Whitman, a kosmos!
Leonnie Dickens, a nebulous singularity then!
The moon then! and the sun, its self-obviating spheroid!
This is the game of it
To make of oneself a dense and spinning thing
An expanding, energy creating, self-sustained system
A ball of matter, a ball of life, the water of the heavens
A wave of a man
A particle of woman
A whole human of starry effluvia
13
As I sit under the burning kerosene star
Of my inspiring voice
Your face begins to be transfixed
Your slender hand, limply like a grain of wheat
Is moved by some unseen spirit
A touch then!
An inciting of the asphodel to blooming
A word escapes you
I have gone ahead to light the torches West
I have lit out for the frontier which we have set no thought on
For you the day has begun anew
For you the river has opened itself
The greed of the first mile from town lights upon you
Here is a diner by the side of the road
I will stop for a moment, have a burger, cross the street
Reserve a room, lay my hat on the chair,
Lengthen my skeleton and sinews upon the bed
And be patient until I hear you ambling into town.
