Walking on the Grass with Walt Whitman

I walk with you and on
You, Walt Whitman, just as you
Promised I would, I walk

On the blades
Of your century’s
Leaves of grass

And there I find you
Where you promised I would,
And so I stop with you

To listen again
As you sing
The body electric,

And I sing along, for I too am
As much Body as I am
Soul, whirring between

The worlds of being a human being,
Where all I am and all you are
Are just electrons moving

The way they move
In their shells of orbits
In the wide space around what

Nuclei we cannot know,
The centers turning to return 
their prana back to prakriti,

back to the grams of matter times
the speed of light squared —
This is what I here release

Back to you,
My father,
My poet of the grass

And yet I seem to see you smile
From under the grass,
still unfinished, still uncontained,

And I seem to hear you saying:
No, my friend, not electrons only,
But touch and breath,

And an arm flung wide
Across another’s shoulder,
And the salt of the body,

And the long tide
Of men and women
Entering and leaving

Each other’s lives, impermanent
As waves returning to their shores
Without regret.

Clark, you say that the soul
Is not elsewhere, that
It is leaning here

In the wrist’s turn,
In the back’s bend,
In the unashamed gaze.

And I, much older now,
I feel the current slowing
In your century, but deeper now —

Not the flash
Of youth alone,
But the steady field

In which all things
Arrive to dissolve
Without sorrow and without loss.

So I stand here with you
Here on still-living leaves of grass,
And I do not pass on —

Not yet —
For the body still hums
And the grass still speaks,

And somewhere between
Your century and mine
The same charge is moving

Unowned,
Unbroken,
Unknown — and it is all

Enough, and it is
All there is — it is all

Enough…
Om shanti,
Shanti,
Shanti.