All Over America
(for Walt Whitman) ~Karen Knight People steal collections of his poetry every day. They're taken from shelves in rare bookshops where they sweat for hours in big overcoat pockets. They take them from the bedside tables of luxurious hotel rooms wrapped in monogrammed towels. In libraries they're often reprimanded on the stairs. In prisons they're confiscated and locked up with the Hershey bars. In the rush hour people take his poems home through the subways. The poems usually have to stand. They're taken into restaurants where they listen to one-sided conversations on mobile phones. But when his poems are taken into hospitals they ease themselves through the sliding doors dressed in immaculate white shirts open at the neck and soft grey felt sombreros that tilt, all the way back. |