b.

Sleeping in the Wilderness
by Maurice Manning

No matter how well you dress the hide
a buffalo rug will always smell like buffalo:
it is a rank odor and wild, charged with old
glands and cud and the memory of running ten
winters, the last two blind. So you take your bed
in this way, raking dry leaves into a grave-sized
mound beneath you, pulling the mossy cloak
upon you and you spit out the last bitter cinders
from your fire and submerge your head, feeling
the dank fur on your face. And you try to breathe.
What good are the dim stars on such nights?
They only make heaven seem colder and farther
away. So you rekindle the dream about Rebecca,
in which the two of you are resting in the shade
of a sycamore and you skip a rock for her across
the river, and as you prepare to skip another,
she grabs your rough hand and puts it in her hair.
Then she lays her generous bones next to yours.
In the morning, you wrap your rug around you,
check your powder, rub some ashes on your teeth
and go to the creek where you wash all traces of night
from your face. You walk until walking warms you,
then you fold the rug and lash it to your horse
and you keep going to the next blue lick and the next,
the taste of salt already on your tongue, a precious
grain of civilization clinging to your brutal frame
like a pocket watch or a lock of hair; but you are looking
for an elk, or a bear, sniffing the air for musk.

HRCFF: Walt Whitman

Harry Ransom Center Friday Finds: Walt Whitman

From Walt Whitman’s correspondence archives:

[1] Letter for Robert Adams (November 5, 1890)

An endearing postscript: “I am under the grip yet and rather badly—have had my breakfast. Bit of meat chop, graham, bread and coffee—am sitting here in my den, in great old ratan chair (with big wolf skin spread over back) sunny but pretty cold—have a good oak wood fire. WW.”

[2] Handwritten text for an article to be printed in The Critic, May 31, 1884.

(Supposedly from Longfellow, re: “Leaves of Grass”)

“When Whitman was about to publish ‘Leaves of Grass’ he sent me the advance sheets for perusal and asked if he might dedicate the book to me. I marked several passages, and replied that, if he would consent to omit the lins indicated, I should feel honored by such a dedication as he proposed; but he answereed that the lines I had marked were the strongest in the book and he could not, under and circumstances, consent to their removal.”

One of the passages was: “The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer.”

(Whitman asked that the following be printed in response.)

“Walt Whitman requests us to deny that no such advance sheets were ever sent to Mr. Longfellow-no such request was made by WW and of course no such answer returned—that in short, neither the episode itself nor anything which in any way could give it a shred of truth ever happened; the old gray adding his very clear conviction that Mr. Longfellow, the sould of goodness and honor, never told anything of the kind.”

Useful Information

The Norwegians have a word for “killer bear.” It is slagbjørn.

Trans. From Å Paradis (Oktober, 2008) by Mona Høvring:

12  (utdrag fra “Heltinnebreva”)

…

Jeg drømmer; i fanget mitt ligger en hjort—
er ikke det en usedvanlig dødsinnvielse?

12  (excerpt from “Heroine Letters”)

…

I dream; in my arms lies a deer—
is this not an unusual initiation to death?

“Can you hear him, Danny?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That is  a bullfrog calling to his wife. He does it by blowing out his dewlap and letting it go with a burp.”
“What is a dewlap?” I asked.
“It’s the loose skin on his throat. He can blow it up just like a little balloon.”
“What happens when his wife hears him?”
“She goes hopping over to him. She is very happy to have been invited. But I’ll tell you something very funny about the old bullfrog. He often becomes so pleased with the sound of his own voice that his wife has to nudge him several times before he’ll stop his burping and turn around to hug her.”
That made me laugh.

- Danny, The Champion of the World by Roald Dahl 

Epitaphs

“Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, Pass by!”
-W. B. Yeats

“Called back”
-Emily Dickinson

“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world”
-Robert Frost

“This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a Young English Poet, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
-John Keats