The possibility of song (Walt sings a duet with Emily)

[just mercedes]

 
 
I dwell in possibility; twenty-eight years
so lone, the fine house by the side
of the bank, a fairer house than prose.
 
Twenty-eight men bathe by the shore.
Paradise. She hides aft blinds of the window,
the gambrels of the sky.
 
Young men float on their backs, visitors,
the fairest, stock still in your room.
They do not ask who seizes.
 
An unseen hand passed over their bodies,
impregnable of eye; descended from their
temples and ribs, spreading wide.
 
More numerous of windows she saw
and loved them. They do not know
of narrow hands glisten’d with wet.
 
Which of the young men?
From their hair the cedars ran,
superior bending arches,
white bellies to the sun.
 
 
 
 





 
 


Poem 'found' in Walt Whitman's {Song of Myself section 11}, and Emily Dickinson's {I dwell in Possibility}

[RiverNotch]

I love reading those two together, btw, though it never happened upon me to fuse them. I found them so alike as I read them, but I think much of my enjoyment came from how different, ultimately how separate, they were, Walt with his steamy sex and overlong lines, Emily with her chaste fire and meticulously constructed houses of cards. But this fusion --- Walt seems to emphasize Emily's crazy hotsies, while Emily seems to actually make Walt truly transcendental. All the love!

Needs a bit of polish, though, in terms of the tenses and commas and shit, though that would make this less of a readymade. The styles of the two are already a little heavy, Emily's even moreso, so that at parts of this fusion, things become a grind. Still, all the love, all the love!

[just mercedes]

I love reading those two together, btw, though it never happened upon me to fuse them. I found them so alike as I read them, but I think much of my enjoyment came from how different, ultimately how separate, they were, Walt with his steamy sex and overlong lines, Emily with her chaste fire and meticulously constructed houses of cards. But this fusion --- Walt seems to emphasize Emily's crazy hotsies, while Emily seems to actually make Walt truly transcendental. All the love!

Needs a bit of polish, though, in terms of the tenses and commas and shit, though that would make this less of a readymade. The styles of the two are already a little heavy, Emily's even moreso, so that at parts of this fusion, things become a grind. Still, all the love, all the love!

Thanks for reading - and yes, the tenses, and first/second/third person changes, make it less logical(?).

I had a massive revelation about Emily recently. I'd never realized that she was writing at the same time as Whitman (I rarely think about a poet's contemporaries). When I did, I thought about her response to the Civil War - exactly the opposite to Whitman's. She internalized her responses, but she still had them, and they came out in her poetry, but in disguise.

So then I had to try to put them together. (I did this too with a cento made from alternate lines of Plath and Hughes, years ago)

And thank you, you saw what I saw. Makes Emily a lot less strange, for me. I had fun.