What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
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It's a poem about reading a poem and going out into the world and seeing it through the poem's (Walt Whitman's) perspective.
He's thinking about the long sections of Walt Whitman listing everything.
Garcia Lorca is a poet who wrote, among other things, City That Does Not Sleep which is quoted by Speed Levitch in one of my favorite movies, Waking Life.
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In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.
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I have no idea what Lorca is talking about. I don't know why living iguanas would bite men who do not dream. I guess I know something about the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.
You go outside on certain nights and look up and you can feel that. Never been bit by no iguana before though.
I'm reading the poem more and it's pretty dark...
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.
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I don't know. I lost the thread on this one. Allen Ginsberg is an absolute rascal and that's all I gotta say about that. Walt Whitman is a dude who said,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And Lorca is a dude who needed a nap.
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