Living and Buried Speech
“What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum” (Walt Whitman).
Perception of variety is enhanced by sobriety. The night in this world alone. How many awful figures could create a tomb for poverty, an end of suffering, awareness of the dark truth of sordid pain, ugliness of evil, the foul fruits of capitalism, the wretched wake of the white man raping the land and the people of the earth, these scars that do not heal, death and the blank spaces left, the mournful wind–her pale dirge scraping this lost continent, once so abundant, teeming with life and health, history, the mad present.
sick of richness sweet with decay
the unclean flavor of an American day
the greatness–the dimensions–the distance
evidence of a mind in good tone
is the tone and logic of the phrasing
I have seen poor people living by the side of the road in Brazil–in the dump and on the city corner–in backyards and waiting on the highway for the bus.
Maybe I saw killers, madmen, saints among the beggars, a woman asking the time though I was eager to peep in at her life in a distant third world country.
I love my body–what if I leave it?
I will–but when will that be?
What is my spirit without my body to take with me?
D. H. Lawrence: “I conceive a man’s body to be an upright flame.”