From the Mockingbird’s Throat

January 3, 2014

Reading Whitman’s “Out of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking” as the dishwasher gurgles into the quiet morning filling the room. For Whitman, longing for another is a quality communicated to man by nature. A boy stands on a beach, hears the mockingbird’s song, long blues of loneliness for his mate. In singing we inflame the source of life, the reason we’re here, to fuck, to love, to find a mate and transform one’s self into “the here and hereafter.”

“The here and hereafter”; the term brings to mind the image of an open door at the end of a hallway no longer than one connecting two rooms in a small apartment. At the end is another door. Both are open. The image blurs into something like early computer graphics, the walls, the rooms, the doors fade as the seen twists through a mine shaft of sky blue. All that remains: two uninhibited door ways that alight on what looks like a man’s torso.