War came again to the world. Old men at the gurudwara, many of who had seen action previously at various outposts of the empire kept discussing it often, their minds seemingly inflamed in the winter of 1941 by their memories of fire. Tully’s uncles, both Uttam and Dhir, however left the room, or if they were outside sitting on the front steps, they went inside, whenever talk turned to war, which was often. They had done their fighting and were now done with what they called the white man’s foolishness and greed. Death and the glorification of it, in the name of civilization and freedom held no more appeal to them. They knew perfectly well what both the barbarian and the conquistador were capable of, given sword, given gunpowder, given gas. However this was not the case with Ricardo.

Ricardo Fernandez, was his wife’s younger brother and only sibling, and since the death of her parents, a son she did not have, had a point to prove. What was it? That he is as good as any other man or boy? That he was indisputably American, as any other, seeking retribution from the Kurat and the Jap, after Pearl Harbour? Tully had been the witness to furious arguments and shouting matches, in Spanish, between Rosa and Ricardo. Rosa kept insisting that Ricardo leave California and go across the border Mexico, to their ancestral village in Guadalajara till the war is over, that he is more than a brother to her, that he needn’t die for a country which is not really his, and which will not fully accept him as its own.

But Ricardo refused to tear up the papers drafting him, asking him to report and sign up for the US Army. So Ricardo, the bright young boy just out of high school with an easy smile, a body that seemed to dance even when standing, and a pitching arm that took his school through the baseball league, had packed his bags. And one February morning Tully drove him down to the rail station at Stockton. As he was shaking Ricardo’s schoolboy hand, and asking him to write to his sister every week, Dhir, Tully’s old uncle who lived close by in town, and who watched Ricardo closely through a boyhood now interrupted by war walked down the platform, his long beard white drift in the morning breeze. And he placed a curved dagger, one of the signs of Khasla, in Ricardo’s outstretched hand.

Tully recognized this dagger. Dhir had carried it through slaughter in Shanghai’s Boxer Rebellion and then through the trenches of World War –I. Much later it found blood of an Irishman up in Bellingham who had beaten Uttam, Dhir’s brother, for no cause other than that he was dirty hindoo. The police never found his body. And after this exchange of arms the old man turned and left. He had no time for goodbyes.

Rosa had earlier refused to come to the station with him and Ricardo. She will have years to mourn this passage even though she doesn’t know this yet. She too gave Ricardo a talisman, her staff to stand still a world that had never stopped shaking under her feet, her mother’s cross, silver and turquoise. So this is how a departure came to be, a curved dagger in the palm, a crucified Christ next to the heart, and a man in the middle passage waving to another, with still turbulent and hopeful blood, passing beyond the bend.

As Exuberant and Encompassing as Ever By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Imagine Walt Whitman as he imagines himself, stretched atop a load of hay, one leg reclined on the other, seizing the clover and timothy, rolling head over heels, tangling his hair full of wisps. And then imagine the farmers - puzzled Long Islanders perhaps - and the oxen at the wagons watching that ecstatic performance. "What is that you express in your eyes?" Whitman asks the oxen, which might ask the same of him. "More than all the print I have read in my life" is his answer.

The untitled poem from which these lines come - later called "Song of Myself" - was first published in "Leaves of Grass," which appeared for sale on the Fourth of July 150 years ago. It's a poem, I'm tempted to say, that still surprises, all the compliment being contained in the word "still," as if America had outrun Whitman long ago and left him breathing hard along the side of the road. But wherever we pull up in our own race, breathing hard ourselves, there is Whitman, as loose-limbed and joyous as ever, moved more by the ecstasy of perception and empathy than by any physical effort. There is no catching up with him. He is always ahead of us.

The Whitman of that great poem is a holy fool, a sprite, a personification able to be everywhere at once, thanks to its immaterial nature. But there has never been a spirit so aware of his sinews and veins, so good at loafing and river-bathing and arousal. The body Whitman inhabits is as inclusive as his mind and feelings. "I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and long-threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots,/And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over," he writes, as though he were the subject of a strange Renaissance portrait.

We read in all this the largess of the man, who turned himself from a mild-mannered journalist - Walter Whitman - into a superman of sorts. It is one of the most profoundly successful acts of self-characterization in all of literature. But in the largess of the man we are also supposed to read - and still do, I think - the exuberance of America itself. The Whitman who celebrates himself finds it easy enough to stay ahead of us, who perhaps sometimes feel that life, as he puts it, is "a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears." That is what really keeps Whitman out in front after 150 years: the America he inhabits in "Leaves of Grass." We have not gotten to it yet.

The place is as real as the poet can make it, peopled with figures like the butcher boy who "puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market," before breaking into a shuffle and breakdown. It is crowded with canal boys and one-year wives, with machinists and slaves and drovers. Missourians cross the plains, and patriarchs sit at supper with their progeny, and trappers and hunters rest under the shade of canvas or adobe. Whitman is among them all, touching them, drinking and sleeping with them, waking in the night to speed, as he says, "with tailed meteors." And he decides, as he reports in the prose introduction to "Leaves of Grass," that "the Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature."

It is our feeble illusion that there have only been Americans since the continent was first settled by Europeans and only here and that they have not necessarily had the fullest poetical nature. Whitman sets us right. There have been Americans everywhere and at all times, he announces. But how are we to know them? One way is by their resemblance to the poet, free-spirited, frank, afraid of neither the flesh nor the spirit. The Americans Whitman means are like the animals themselves. "They do not sweat and whine about their condition,/They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins." The sensuous energy they embody harmonizes perfectly with their practical energy.

They also believe that the great poets extend an invitation to them, as Whitman does. "Come to us on equal terms," he writes, "Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy." The very manner of Whitman's verse reinforces that invitation. It turns no one away. "You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle," he urges, and it's true. We should have been. We would know something about the boatmen and clam diggers even Whitman cannot tell us. We would know something more about the poet and ourselves.

One hundred and fifty years on, this poem has not even begun to tire. It wakes us to the moment of our being and to the place in which that moment is passing. It halts us in our haste and makes us look down at our bodies without reluctance. It leads us to a country whose genius "is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors ... but always most in the common people." Up the road, we can always glance Whitman ahead of us. "I stop some where waiting for you," he writes. "If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles."

Notes: I have avoided archiving stuff from elsewhere at Buoy but this truely is a happy leaf of grass to add to the plie already here!