Catalogicity Heuristic

I CELEBRATE myself,

For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,

I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked,

The smoke of my own breath,

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,

The sound of the belched words of my voice, words loosed to the eddies of the wind,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,

The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you practiced so long to learn to read?

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,

I and this mystery here we stand.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age,

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,

I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;

And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels, swelling the house with their plenty,

That they turn from gazing after and down the road,

Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead?

People I meet—the effect upon me of my early life, of the ward and city I live in, of the nation,

My dinner, dress, associates, looks, work, compliments, dues,

The sickness of one of my folks, or of myself, or ill-doing, or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,

But they are not the Me myself.

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

Looks with its side-curved head, curious what will come next,

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,

I believe in you, my soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you,

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

You settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turned over upon me,

And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields,

And mossy scabs of the worm-fence, heaped stones, elder, mullen, pokeweed.

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

Growing among black folks as among white,

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And ceased the moment life appeared.

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good,

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,

They do not know how immortal, but I know.

For me those that have been boys and that love women,

For me the sweetheart and the old maid—for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,

For me children and the begetters of children.

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale, nor discarded,

And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and can never be shaken away.

I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.

I peeringly view them from the top.

It is so—I witnessed the corpse—there the pistol had fallen.

The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,

The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of roused mobs,

The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,

The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,

What groans of over-fed or half-starved who fall sun-struck, or in fits,

What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrained by decorum,

I mind them or the resonance of them—I come and I depart.

The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,

The armfuls are packed to the sagging mow;

I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other;

And roll head over heels, and tangle my hair full of wisps.

Wandering, amazed at my own lightness and glee,

Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-killed game,

The Yankee clipper is under her three sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopped for me,

You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

Her father and his friends sat near, cross-legged and dumbly smoking—they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders,

One hand rested on his rifle, the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl,

The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,

Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,

And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet,

And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,

He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north,

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,

Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

She hides, handsome and richly drest, aft the blinds of the window.

Ah, the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

Little streams passed all over their bodies.

It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,

The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,

From the cinder-strewed threshold I follow their movements,

Overhand the hammers roll, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,

The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,

His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast, and loosens over his hip-band,

The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache, falls on the black of his polish'd and perfect limbs.

I go with the team also.

To niches aside and junior bending.

It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

They rise together, they slowly circle around;

And acknowledge, red, yellow, white, playing within me,

And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,

And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation;