By Raymond Luczak
"Everybody here is so like everybody else and I am Walt Whitman!" — Walt Whitman
Once I pass'd through a populous city...
with its shows, architecture, customs, and traditions.
You roamed the lower Broadway in the 1840s, didn't you,
looking for the errant eye of a handsome young rogue
in need of a drink and a bedding-down.
No one needed to know. Marriage was for nellies.
We two boys together clinging, One the other never leaving.
You allowed yourself to be sunburnt and freckled.
You were already gray by the time you turned thirty.
You were already a daddy in training.
Then in 1848, you went down to New Orleans.
I remember only the man who wandered with me,
there, for love of me. Your senses
must've exploded in such sensuous love
of his tongue on yours, how sweet the soil
upon which he stood before you. Revelation
of sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch
couldn't be hidden inside your breast pocket.
You have given me love! therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love!
You had to sing like Marietta Alboni, damn them all!
Life, the greatest opera on earth, unleashed
in you lines, garrulous and rambling,
one after another, celebrating not just him
whose name we shall never know
but all whom you'd loved down on the docks,
the upper echelons of Astor Place Opera House,
and lower Broadway. Again he holds me by the hand—I must not go!
Everywhere was a possibility of conjugation
between men, women, and all capable of living.
How could anyone not see such music? I hear America singing.
Raymond Luczak ( raymondluczak.com ) is the author and editor of eight books, including Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life and Eyes of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader.