“I'm with you in Rocklandin my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”

“Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”

“America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.”

“America, why are your libraries full of tears?”

“I never dreamed the sea so deep,The earth so dark; so long my sleep,I have become another child.I wake to see the world go wild.”

“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the treeswith a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming ofyour enumerations! ”

“I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows --/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.”