Cook, Kevin

Digital Commons @ Butler University

26 MANUSCRIPTS·I SING THE BODY ECLECTICorWhat if Whitman Had Had a Grumpy Day?Kevin Cook1I sing the body eclectic,That army offans of mine bugs me and I bug them,They will not let me off till I act daring, break some rules,And scandalize them, and charge them by the line for my endlesscounting-off of stuff.Was it doubted thata guy who gets paid by the volume would be less thanvoluminous?And if those who tile fluffy fillers are as bad as those who pad dimenovels?And is it not proof of my clairvoyance that I can do a "Book of Lists" ahundred years before DavidWhatsisname?2Does any of this make any sense to you, 0 common man?Ask me ifIcare./The male is perfect. The female is perfect. It's when they get togetherthat's dis gusti ng.The sprawl and fullness of two babes around my arms, the bosoms andfolds of their dresses, thezowie curves of their bods downwards,The swimmer naked seen through my binoculars, alI this is my subjectmatter, and you may ask,What make you any different from another dirty old man, WaItWhitman?MANUSCRIPTS 27And I may wrestle with the sinews of your eyes and say,Blow it out your ear, fathead.3I have perceiv'd that to be with those I like, if you know what I mean, isenough for an old geezer like me,To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh isenough,To pass among these hangers-on, these literary groupies, and rest myarm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is thisthen?I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. I'm not as young asI used to be.There is something in being close to sweating horselike men and womenand looking on their heaving forms, and in the contact and odor ofthem, that makes you want to throw up.But these things please the fans, and so I put them in.4I'm skipping this verse.You want to make something of it?5A woman's body at auction,That line ought to sell a million copies right there.She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers, she isyou, she is me, she carries all of us inside her. She must be veryuncomfortable.She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to more mothers.More dirty stuff.Have you ever loved the body of a woman?Have you ever loved the body of a man?Have you ever loved the body of a cactus?Very carefully.28 MANUSCRIPTSIfany thing is sacred the human body is sacred,For any thing I put in my poems is either sacred or montonous,And the human body is not monotonous.And in man or woman a clean, strong, rippling form-fitted body, is morebeautiful than the most beautiful face.Except maybe for Farrah Fawcett. Or Redford.Wowee.Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? Or the fool thatcorrupted her own live body?For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves. Andfor two twenties ...6o mybody! You may not be much to look at, but who cares when you're aliterary giant?I believe that you are the source of my work,I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and they aremy poems, anyone else would be ashamed ofthem but not me, nosir, and here we go again,/Man's, woman's, child's, yours, mine and ours, Tom's, Dick's, andHarry's, Moe's, Larry's and Curly Joe's, and even Shemp's,Head, neck, eyebrows, earlobes, toenails, that indentation between yournose and your upper lip that doesn't have a name, head bone,thighbone, connected to the anklebone, anklebone connected tothe footbone, foot bone connected to the toe bone,Hale and hearty, Laurel and Hardy, Gilligan, the Captain, Marianne,the Professor, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III, Tinker, Evers,Chance, Martin and Lewis, Sinclair and Lewis, Lewis and Clark,Clark and Bar, Rogers and Hart, Rogers and Hammerstein,Rogers and Dale, Annette and Cubby, Gilda and Garrett and Johnand Danny and the new guy and Chevy, and Chris and Jimmy andBurt and Dinah and Elvis and Bing,Heart valves: palate-valves, bivales, sexuality, maternity, modernity,fraternity, sorority, topography, monopoly, sorry, password,scrabble,Food, drink, swallow, pulse, digest, burp,MANUSCRIPTS 29The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downwardtoward and past the knees. The beauty of the t1oor. The beauty ofthe basement. The beauty of China.The thin red jellies within you and me, the bones and marrow in thebones, the strawberry jam on your shirt and the peanut butterstuck between my teeth. Yuk.The exquisite realization of health, or in my case the sublime sensibilityof senility;o wow, this is the stuff of my poems, the yelIow pages of the nineteenthcentury,This is "'the stuff that made me famous, so I can put down anything Idamn please and people will buy it and put it in English textbooksfor God's sake,o I say now everyone of my poems is a Whitman Sampler, and I was thefirst one to go in big for Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and I likeChicago too, but that's another poem by another guy.

I Sing the Body Eclectic

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I Sing the Body Eclectic

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