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I
am teaching Walt Whitman
to college sophomores in Florida,
something about the grass being the hair
on their grandmothers' arms
and the beards of lovers, grass that
covers and graces graves, and then
the rapture, the dull revelatory kind,
in which my diligent Christian
students vanish, only the leavings
of their white briefs and cotton bras,
sneakers, khakis, shirts, pins, purses,
and even crucifixes. Poof!
And they're all gone. The seven of us
left behind, yes, a little struck
dumb and doomy, until I say,
"Well now, let's really talk Whitman!"
Does
it need saying
that George W. Bush vanishes, leaving
Dick Cheney to suffer a cataclysmic
failure of the heart? Thus, Dennis
Hastert is now my president, all that stands
between me and the unconvertible Jews,
al-Qaeda, Suddam Hussein, North
Korea, Iran, Fidel Castro, and the anti-Christ.
I feel plenty safe.
Sure, I have to hear Mormons
screaming Mimi about staying on
this planet Earth, and yes, endure CNN
and its crawl of "America's Angels!":
Billy Graham . . . Charles Colson . . .
Katherine Harris . . . Kurt Warner . . .
Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of LightÔ .
. .
Sure, lots of the left behind will gnash
their teeth, repent bitterly, start self-destructing,
but not me.
Need
I say that my ex-wife,
the Southern Baptist, is gone? So, too,
my thirteen-year-old son, and it
comforts me to regard them
so full of God that I am humbled,
meaning low or lowing, but not
low-down. What comforts me, too,
is how I will go home
after this divinely interrupted class,
to my Gerri, and we'll touch one
another, our unregenerate selves,
for to touch is to stay. We'll
have dinner, rice, steamed corn,
a beer, and then a dip in the community
pool, or maybe a twilight trip
to the edge of the Everglades,
to listen to the spoonbills and dragonflies
hum and call and mate before
nightfall. There, we will become
sleep heavy, among
these resting animal kin, amid
all this untroubled grass.
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