Walt Whitman

Celebrating the American poet with long-lined poems by Matt Hohner, Lisa Couturier and Mark Elber.

TRANSCRIPT

Poet Walt Whitman was born on Long Island May 31st, 1819, lived in Washington DC during the Civil War, and died in Camden, New Jersey. Many people then and still now consider him the quintessential American poet, writing not about heroes but about the common man and the democratic vision. He wrote in long, prosey lines. To celebrate Whitman, three Passager poems written in long, prosey lines.

Matt Hohner wrote “Your Last Entry in My Baby Book Before You Left” about his adoptive mother who left the family when he was ten years old. It begins with the epigraph “Lankford Hotel, Ayresbilt Apartments, Ground Floor South.”

You once told me in my early teens that you’d thought about leaving
the family three years before you finally did. Somehow, despite having

one foot out the door, you managed to keep up appearances, maintaining
the facade, an A average in college you’d started a year earlier, and periodic

entries in my baby book as unofficial recorder of minutes and moments
in the meeting of my young life and the world you were about to demolish.

Your uniform, elegant, impeccably legible cursive decorates my early timeline
like cake icing: first haircut, first bicycle, first days of school, first adult tooth.

Your last entry has no notes, only dates, as if jotted in the margin of an old
polaroid with no image to show for it: Ocean City, MD, August 22-29, 1981.

By then, you’d checked out in spirit, still filling lunchboxes like a line cook,
running errands, doing laundry, applying iodine and band-aids to skinned

knees with the rote concern of a school nurse, bedtime prayers a quick chore.
I remember little of you that last vacation together. What I know is what endures:

that the sand scorched bare feet at noon, the surf was just warm and rough enough
for a boy, the acrid stab of creosote from old boardwalk timbers stung my nose,

that the mild salt air of my memory was a nighttime balm through open screen
windows in our apartment on 8th Street. Had God been a lifeguard that summer,

He might have spotted the riptide forming in you, whistled the rest of us safely away
from the treacherous waters you stopped struggling against that pulled you out to sea.

From Passager’s 2024 Poetry Contest issue, Matt Hohner’s poem “Your Last Entry in My Baby Book Before You Left.”

Lisa Couturier wrote this poem about her father with Parkinson’s disease who always tries to walk to his favorite pond to see the birds. “With the Hope My Father Dies While Dreaming.”

When your blood becomes ink & your fingers loosen long enough to rewrite the
years you lost like glossy ibises stranded in a storm, you will know. When your
snail-quiet voice that slithered to a trail of glitter in the sun returns loud, and laughing,
you will know you’re in the other world. Go then. Leave me then. In that dream.

Dream of the orange sky we ran under when we ran to our pond. Your muscles
perfectly clapped around your bones & your mind, sharp as your whistle, called
every melodic muscle, tendon and artery into action, as though a chorus sang
across the stage of your perfect, beautiful body.

Water hens and herons, apple snails, alligators – they’ll be at our pond. Forget fast.
Forget stepping the big steps we stepped last spring when, with my arm around your
bone-thin hips, we inhaled the possibility I could keep you alive with my promises
that brisk walks rushed oxygen to your brain and made you stronger.

Let’s go! like you used to say, before Parkinson’s stopped your standing ovations
and Lewy Body dementia closed the curtains we tried each day to open. Shuffle if
you must to make it there, if that’s all that’s left in your legs to do. I’ll be on the
bench, like the day the osprey flew in and pierced the sky with the talon of his voice.

The osprey who lifted away on his
agile wings, answering quite precisely
the question forever pressing
against life: I was here. I was here.

From Passager’s 2022 Poetry Contest issue, Lisa Couturier’s poem “With the Hope My Father Dies While Dreaming.” By the way, Lisa has another poem in Passager’s latest issue.

Several of the poems in Mark Elber’s book Headstone are about his family and especially his father. Here’s an excerpt from the title poem, “Headstone.”

I was born under the El in screaming distance of Bliss Street
I was born, Manhattan on the horizon, Galitzia at my back
Attended to by a microscope, a stethoscope, and a tongue depressor

You were born in the attic of your maternal grandparents’ home where the borders migrate and
the cold Carpathian Mountain air opened your lungs as you cried for the first time and it was February and it was a century just eight years old

I was born carrying your parents’ names into the New World after the death of song, after the
death of prayer, after the death of spring, and yet the sun still managed to break the buds out of the stillborn branches and stun each day with a limitless palette

And then you were six and your father went beardless into the First World War in an Austrian uniform as you moved to Vienna, a cousin’s apartment, and it was school and German
and two more brothers

(And I turned six with Walt Disney, toy soldiers, no grandparents, and the war always there with
the chocolate milk, the hula-hoop, the tricycle, the baseball mitt and your English as a seventh language)

And you became a bar mitzvah, eldest male child of the eldest male child, your father away in
the forest all week with his well-hewn face, with his growing piety, his foreman’s position, measured words and muscular forearms

And your mother who cried before their wedding for the shearing of her hair which your father
had spared as they sat in separate rooms a messenger running between till they met under a prayer shawl drinking the consecrated wine, stamping the glass into the oblivion it would share with the ancient Temple and so soon with all those drinking, dancing, and singing

An excerpt from Mark Elber’s poem “Headstone.”

To by Mark’s book Headstone, subscribe to, contribute to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, go to passagerbooks.com. Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.

For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.

Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.