Walt,
“One touch of your hand to mine O boy” — “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” Walt Whitman
by Eric Cline
It is not just that I am younger now than you
were then: a beacon of hope in father’s garb, twice
as old as those you held tenderly but not twice
as tenderly; kisses were reciprocated
in mud huts, on open air, burnt and dried, their wet
sometimes the only such left, bodies giving what
there is to give shortly before bullets’ receipt.
No, I think I will feel as your son, will entreat
you even if I should come to gather a glut
of years beyond your ever having. Should sun set
before me for the last before I have sated
this need to tell, I shall be as deserter. Thrice
I could live and not know what you by one knew; thrice
I would kiss you and beg you rend my limbs askew.
Eric Cline is a poet. His chapbooks include his strange boy eve (Yellow Chair Press, 2016), something farther across the ocean (Throwback Books, 2017), cicada shell: life in a queer body (Tenderness Lit, 2018), and The Temporary (forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press). A more extensive bibliography can be found at https://ericclinepoet.neocities.org/
