When Walt Whitman finally died,

reconstruction of his little house was done.

Jim Crow bought it for dirt cheap

at auction on the county courthouse steps.

Yellowed newsprint insulated the walls

with faded stories of union strikes,

peaceful ends to Indian Wars,

and frontiers finally closed.

Blindness is no gift to a prophet.

One must love the body politic

as much as the soul of a nation.

Poetry mocks its own graven image.

How could he know commodified atoms

would pass through conduits of commerce

from one assuming party to another

for consideration yet unnamed?

Names he never wrote litter his pages.

Like all refuse, these names are hidden

in landfills, mass graves, unmarked mounds,

left blank on government maps.

No epic is transcribed without revision,

no history without the editor’s pen.

What do we make of negative space

replete with words never written?

Who asked to be the object of his giving?

Not me. Who was he to command I assume

his praise poem? His second celebrated line

is nothing more than imperative, unreflexive.

If the soul of America contains multitudes,

the lumpen, worthy of praise but not title,

then it also contains legions, ranks and files,

with scutum and pilum and fasces and pax.

Oh, you were a seductive old rascal

who whispered of unified melodies

so mellifluous that we forget each note

sung demands infinite left unvoiced.