Mercy

there’s no w ay past the present, you are right there in the

middle o f your own real life riding a wave a mile high with

speed and grace and then you are pulled under to the bottom o f

the world. The whole w orld’s alive, everything moves and

wants and loves, the whole w orld’s alive with promise, with

possibility; and I wanted to live, I said yes I want to live.

There’s not something new about wanting love in spite o f

knowing terror; or feeling love and having it push against

your thighs from inside and then those thighs carry you out

past safety into hell. There’s nothing new about wanting to

love a multitude. I was born on Mickle Street in Camden in

1946, down the street from Walt Whitman’s house. I grew up

an orphan sheltered by the passion o f his great heart. He

wanted everyone. He wanted them, to touch. He was forced,

by his time and place, into metaphor. He put it in poems, this

physicalized love that was universal, he named the kinds and

categories he wanted, men and women, he said they were

worthy, all, without exception, he said he wanted to be on

them and in them and he wanted them in him, he said it was

love, he said lam , he said lam and then he enumerated the ones

he wanted, he made lam synonymous with you are and we are.

Leaves of Grass is his lists o f lovers, us, the people, all o f us; he

used grandiose language but it was also common, vulgar; he

says I ant you and you and you, you exist, I touch you, I know

you, I see you, I recognize you, I want you, I love you, I am. In

the C ivil War he was devoted to wounded soldiers. He faced

the maiming and the mutilation, and he loved those boys:

“ (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d

and rested, /M any a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded

lips. )” It was before surgeons washed their hands, before

Lister, and legs were sawed off, sutures were moistened with

saliva, gangrene was commonplace. He visited the wounded

soldiers day in and day out. He didn’t eroticize suffering, no; it

was the communion o f being near, o f touching, o f a tender

intimacy inside a vale o f tears. He saw them suffer and he saw

them die and he wrote: “ (Come sweet death! be persuaded O

beautiful death! / In mercy come quickly. )” I got to say, I don’t

think a three-minute fuck was his meaning. I don’t. It’s an

oceanic feeling inside and you push it outward and once you

start loving humanity there is no reason to make distinctions

o f beauty or kind, there’s something basic in everyone that

asks love, forgiveness, an honorable tenderness, a manly

tenderness, you know, strong. He was generous. Call him a

slut. I f a war happens, it marks you for life, it’s your war.

Walt’s was the C ivil War, North against South, feuding

brothers, a terrible slaughter, no one remembers how bloody