Lessons from Whitman, Before he Wakes

Whitman stares me deeply in the eye, his hand shakily nearing his face. “Nose,” I say, & he brings his finger to his nose & that smile of his cracks across his face, all cavernous dimples & bright joy. His discoveries are daily wonders. When Ada went through all of this, we were both capable of being right there with her, witness to her every revelation. Now, she tugs at the frayed ends of our attentions just as he does, & we are ourselves, we think, somewhere in between. We pour ourselves out. Our children grow. 

I think about Whitman & the buoyancy of his progress. How he greets his successes, with a shock of deep-welling mirth. He celebrates them, however seemingly small, however mundane, because he can greet himself in congratulations, in recognition that he is a force in this world. His happiness crescendoes in chortles accompanied most often by a sort of tornado-like tendency toward frantic self-exertion. As if evidence of being the cause of any effect is reward enough. Blocks are thrown habitually across the room, his arm swipes across his high chair, sending bananas & cheerios airborne. He finds hollow things & hammers them with other hollow things, extolling in thunderous booms his name. He wants to physically manifest, maybe, the recognition that merely to be in this world is to be a cosmos, a massive constellation of wonders that leaves its imprint everywhere in unencrypted script. The plain fact of him. His Whitmanness. 

I see these celebrations of his a hundred times a day & can’t help but wonder where they go. Ada remains an enthusiast of self-congratulation. The map of her imagination carries her around worlds of discovery & adventure, & along the way, you see the same filament of accomplishment burning. It seems the same stuff as a life force, spirit, coiled thing burst forth from chthonic slumber. It carries the air & the breeze & the sunlight & birdsong. It is lambent & charged & lovely, tinsel shook in summer. I miss it in me, want the warm touch of my own hand on my shoulder in encouragement. 

There, in the push & pull of two children, in the slivers wherein the light of my own self is yet visible, I see such dreaming in dormancy. We will all start to speak the same languages, Ada & Whitman & us, in time. I can give them the names of things, the contours of my own feeling. Take them to those blank spots on the map. I will offer them all that I can, & they will take what suits them & then, some day, find their sustenance along paths I’ve never trod, in worlds I’ve never imagined. & then, with all of the light left in me, I will celebrate, our mirth drinking from theirs, our souls enwreathed, our hearts out in the world bearing their names, smiling at every fugitive joy, a birdsong in the spring.