For HRS

Past the third waterfall he said, and that’s all I knew
that spring in early skunk cabbage dreams
and failed attempts to take trout in Black Creek—

where, as a child, barely four, my feet threaded
the rocks draped with herring nets and old men
spoke in short gusts of impatience and laughter

down beside the rushing black waters where
I swear the tallest man in the world stooped
as I stumbled he smiled from the sky—

Black Creek where I fished, age 21, on Easter Sunday
and remembered the tallest man and how
I saw him once on the Sawkill casting line

when I was just 13, he used a worm and the biggest
trout chased, caught, I ran to ask him how
but when I reached the stream he was gone

and when I fished Black Creek, I remembered
his worms but caught nothing on that cold Sunday
thinking of that man who came down from the sky—

where years later the train cut through, feet wet, finally
I caught trout from Black Creek and brought it to
the tallest man in the world and his wife cooked it

and we ate it and she smiled so happy—where
I said I want to find Whitman’s spring and he said
go on in past the third waterfall—Burroughs called 

those woods Whitman Land, because he loved it, Whitman
once described Black Creek—and we said it together
because he had told me a dozen times, but I always waited

for him to start saying again—Whitman said that it was
“A primitive forest, druidical, solitary and savage”;
at least he got that right,and we smiled, because we knew

he got a few other things right too, but Black Creek—
where all things are buried, even the dam that held
the biggest trout, gone, under earth like all things

except the songs and poems our poets sing
under stone storm that bends and—Black Creek
was not the Cooper River where years later

the tallest man took me to his childhood dreams
in Whitman’s Camden, brick rowhouses, Poet’s Row
sagged under bulk of sorrow, streets of stone,

dead weeds clogging sidewalks—
where turning a corner four men approached our van
where years later children played in streets and bronze

swirls of Cooper River told us about some kid’s dreams
of the world and his urge to rage the source—
that day we raged the source of Whitman’s mania

we laughed at Burroughs’ gentility, resolved to fish
once more in Black Creek as we rode the ferry back to
Philly—we looked for Walt Whitman that day

beside the poison ivy and river boulders
and heard him singing like a hermit thrush
my heart shuddered and the water kept flowing

into and out of the tall man’s world