I resist anything better than my own diversity,īreathe the air but leave plenty after me, What should I say? Whitman drew me here, and now I am a woman who must cast herself on the kindness of others: Now that would be an odd statement to make to an officer at the other end of the table when one is taking a citizenship test-How many stars, how many stripes, how many states? etc. I could not have come to America without Whitman. Am I on a “trottoir,” as he called it? Am I really in Mannahatta? I totter a little with the unsteadiness of it all. The grass is filled with moisture, rather cold and glittery, and the bits of ice on the blades help moisten my tongue. There are bits of grass in his mouth, and when I am about to pass out, with all the air gushing through-we make a curious kind of airplane together-he pushes a few stalks into my mouth. Sometimes, in times of difficulty, when reinvention of the self is a fierce necessity-a time such as now-I think of myself as having been wafted here by Walt, a creature with a tumbling grey beard, cap askew, bony wings sprouting out of his corduroy jacket. I cannot imagine myself in America without Whitman. That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should
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