Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,

Is he from the Mississippi country? or from Iowa, Oregon or California? or from the mountains? or prairie life or bush-life? or from the sea?

Is he some southwesterner raised outdoors? Is he Canadian?

Is he waiting for civilization or past it and mastering it?

The friendly and flowing savage .... Who is he?

And are aware how I am with you no more than I am with everybody.

And that my steps drag behind yours yet go before them,

And know that they who have eyes are divine, and the blind and lame are equally divine,

I see the approach of your numberless gangs .... I see you understand yourselves and me,

Eleves I salute you,

The blossoms we wear in our hats are the growth of two thousand years.

Our swift ordinances are on their way over the whole earth,

Inland and by the seacoast and boundary lines .... and we pass the boundary lines.

We walk the roads of Ohio and Massachusetts and Virginia and Wisconsin and New York and New Orleans and Texas and Montreal and San Francisco and Charleston and Savannah and Mexico,

I troop forth replenished with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,

The corpses rise .... the gashes heal .... the fastenings roll away.

The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it .... or to any graves,

I remember .... I resume the overstaid fraction,

That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning!

That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!

That I could forget the mockers and insults!

I discover myself on a verge of the usual mistake.

Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping,

Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!

The whirling and whirling is elemental within me.

I rise extatic through all, and sweep with the true gravitation,

I project my hat and sit shamefaced and beg.

Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them,

My face is ash-colored, my sinews gnarl .... away from me people retreat.

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp, but I also lie at the last gasp,

Not a youngster is taken for larceny, but I go up too and am tried and sentenced.

I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.

Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to the jail, but I am handcuffed to him and walk by his side,

It is I let out in the morning and barred at night.

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,

And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

And see myself in prison shaped like another man,

I become any presence or truth of humanity here,

I become as much more as I like.

These become mine and me every one, and they are but little,

What burnt the gums of the redcoat at Saratoga when he surrendered his brigades,

What sobers the Brooklyn boy as he looks down the shores of the Wallabout and remembers the prison ships,

What stills the traveler come to the vault at Mount Vernon,

What the savage at the stump, his eye-sockets empty, his mouth spirting whoops and defiance,

What the rebel said gaily adjusting his throat to the rope-noose,

O Christ! My fit is mastering me!

These so .... these irretrievable.

The wheeze, the cluck, the swash of falling blood .... the short wild scream, the long dull tapering groan,

The hiss of the surgeon’s knife and the gnawing teeth of his saw,

Delicate sniffs of the seabreeze .... smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore ... death-messages given in charge to survivors,