On Blennerhassett Island With Walt Whitman

He sat on this patch of turf, and if not this exact place a piece of a place nearby. Naturally, I try to feel his companionship. Did he write a line of poetry on this small island or was he simply being Walt Whitman, honored guest, a person he hardly recognized from his youth? I feel his old bones not his youthful step but also his long poems as they ride Ohio river currents at ease with the next slow bend, or some quick kink and churn of its history. I imagine his hand on the ground, it heaves my body up from a deep grass and quilts me to a terrain where fingers meet on a shared wrist a place where heron wings beat. I feel the mutuality of crossed roads, the cadence of shore eddies as they unbutton a coat he left draped over a rail of this wooden jetty.