American Business: Walt Whitman, Still One Of The Roughs at 200
b. May 31, 1819
i.
Whenever he was asked what business he was in,
Walt Whitman never answered with less than an earful.
He was in the business of America — our incomparable materials,
taking his sweet Whitmanian time by way of explanation,
breath by living breath, an intoxicating master of the gabfest.
Once out of the cradle, his life was a racket of joyful noise.
He’d do business with anyone who listened hard, who understood
at least this much: Whitman really meant it, this remarkable American
business, something he was forever getting down to. Taking care of.
The way he saw it, there was always more to do, and we were all
in this newfangled business together, which would take some serious
getting used to. It might have been easier just minding his own for once
and leaving it at that. But Whitman simply didn’t have it in him
ever to leave any kind of well enough alone.
He was never less than a benevolent buttinsky, although
he preferred the more distinctive lilt of camerado.
ii.
Walt Whitman would have been hell-on-wheels as a traveling salesman
if only in his time a reliable car had been invented, or any such thing as
a car at all. As it was, he got around under his own considerable power,
working his way door to door, selling America to itself, one person
at a time, refusing to take no for an answer. Sure, there were some days
when folks weren’t in a buying mood, but boisterous drummer Whitman was
no less exuberant for that: Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Even without a car, no windshield racking up dead insects,
no grille festooned with careless animals, Whitman himself claimed to be,
somehow, stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over.
And after demonstrating something every modern family clearly needed,
he could have moved vacuum cleaners galore, and years later
who-knows-how-many pricey deluxe sets of color encyclopedias,
suddenly a prestige item in the well-appointed-home sophistication craze.
Instead, he carried a humble supply of brooms, mops, and brushes
in his homemade, rough-hewn pushcart. And less modestly on offer, copies
of his newest publication, his latest Leaves of Grass. When it came to this
unheard-of American business, Walt Whitman liked to say
that he more or less wrote the book, or this is no book — who touches this
touches a man. Either way, a few dollars wouldn’t be asking too much.
And O, the fever dreams that came upon him then:
Whitman with his cell phone charging!
Whitman with his untamed beard on Instagram!
Whitman’s storied multitudes uncontainable on Twitter!
iii.
And although by now the traveling door-to-door salesman is an idea
whose time has come and almost gone completely, I can’t stop
thinking about how good at it he would have been. He came
to consider the city, the rush of the streets, his most productive territory,
but he could reckon the thousand acres too, leaving the last house
at the end of the lane that opens into an immensity of field,
and somewhere out there, a farmhouse (if you’re old enough
to see this coming, you can say you did, and I won’t be disappointed)
where a farmer and his daughter have been waiting a long time
to feature in this kind of story, in exactly this situation, but
Whitman’s not some helpless rube in the middle of a traveling-salesman’s
joke. He’s not about to break down and stay the night. This is Walt Whitman
we’re talking about, and there’s no way he’ll be distracted by
any farmer’s daughter. No matter how innocent or beautiful she is,
it’s America he loves. He’s all business, the unfinished-business
business of America — all that yawping over the roofs still ahead.
And anyway, he knows that a vacuum cleaner’s not a good fit
for a farmhouse, and no one’s likely to be especially impressed
by a full set of encyclopedias on display up there in the hayloft.
There’s so much more to be said, and he can live with that
just fine for the rest of his life—this peculiar American
business his heart would always be wide open for.
* * * * *
Advice for Whoever’s Reading This Right Now
i.
If I were you, I wouldn’t be.
I’d be re-watching my own low-budget Casablanca,
minus the intrigue and danger: Debbie Fuller,
my 10-year-old 5th-grade reason for living, leaving town
forever, taking off into a night thick with fog, vaguely
heroic in her family’s overloaded station wagon.
Leaving me to round up the usual suspects
in my imagination, especially when it comes to poems
a lot like this one, ever since:
I’m in the back yard at midnight, restless, more than ready
for the flying saucers that surely would be landing at last,
the Space Brothers disembarking, delivering a message
of universal love that never got as far as me before.
Or I’m in my room with Clifford Brown on the hi-fi again,
that impossible music pouring out of his horn, and I’m trying
to keep pace with him on my two-bit band-school trumpet
I’d first taken up, thinking This should be easy. Three notes.
Or I’m at a séance with my aunt, listening for my departed uncle—
seldom on time for anything in his life either, although he’s now
remembered more fondly for all that: the late great Uncle Bud —
and instead, inexplicably, I hear the voice of Richard Nixon.
And when will Bigfoot sit for a legitimate photo portrait
and who and how many killed JFK in Dallas at high noon
and seriously, the CIA talking itself into bed with LSD
and why did my lunch-bucket father give up on professional wrestling?
ii.
But okay, I’ll be the first to admit it — so far,
so pretty good, right? I’ve done what’s in my power to see
that no misfortune has befallen you, exactly. And maybe
it occurs to you, as it does now and then here where I am,
there could be much worse ways to pass the time.
Although if I were you, I wouldn’t
take comfort, exactly, in that sort of flimsy reassurance.
Even though we’ve barely met, trust me: enough might
finally be enough. Just ask Debbie Fuller, who knew
enough to get out while the getting was still mostly good.
I’ve been known to go on longer than I need to,
and the last thing I want is for you
to be completely disenchanted, or a little disappointed,
or otherwise in any sense dissatisfied.
At least this time
there’s an end in sight. Go ahead and take a look — it’s less
than a stanza away. I’ll save your place in the sudden line
of readers forming behind you, but I wouldn’t be
in any particular hurry. Or at all convinced
that this has been anywhere close to the best poem
you or I have ever almost made it to the end of.
* * * * *
Abbreviated Publication History
Would I have seen your work anywhere?
Well, not just anywhere.
Usually my poems first appear
in pulsing beams of light
on nights no one expects them.
They’re subsequently issued
as limited-edition, numbered
letterpress broadsides
printed on 100-pound glossy
white deli-sandwich paper.
There are a few signed copies,
but the signatures are almost
always smudged.
Eventually they’re included
in some landmark anthology
or another, like
Thinking of Poetry — But Why?
available for a fraction
of what it cost me
to finish any one of them
in the first place.