Kiki's Guardians

After the last angel leaves, Walt Whitman still walks beside her, invisible, blowing kisses into the ears of punks and bankers alike, checking a lapel for sheen and lint, tousling the hairdo of a girl. How has it come to this, that only one committed optimist has not deserted? Surely she is blessed with good air and water, and reckless trucks do not seek her out. She was not beaten by mother or stranger, raped by an uncle. She was not set upon by sores. She is not found lingering near the rails of her town’s high bridge.

Yet she has stood at Minneopa Falls, water falling twice, and not known how to go on. In the deepest part of spring, spray rose up from rocks with the roar of falling, and she could not see beyond her family, losing and finding their ways over and over, losing and finding her. Back in the city, cars go down one street and back the next, and call it change. Drivers look at her like ditch grass or deer, part of the view. How has it come to this, Americans alone in sedans and trucks, waiting for her to flip them off, to say something stupid before they turn off their engines and assault her? How has it come to this, violence the best drug for a deadening routine, Third Street to Broad to Third Street?

When she was eight, the first angel tapped her on the shoulder just before sleep. Maybe it was the way to say she didn’t need him, there in a split-level house, Los Angeles, ocean air a balm for anything. Even then, children stepped on mines. She saw pictures of the swollen bellies, flies drinking a boy’s tears. They had all the right subscriptions in those days. Maybe she didn’t need an angel to keep her lucky, safe from TB in the dust. She had the pink sugar cube that fought polio, the loaves that fought hunger. She lived far away from the reckless truck jumping sidewalks in other parts of the world. Falling asleep, two taps on the shoulder, maybe it was the way to say he’d see her later.

Walt Whitman likes the bars with patios in front, where smokers huddle since the ban, where people drink and sometimes know a sparrow from a finch. Even when she’s talking, he whispers lines she won’t remember. The people roar like water. A friend wears the face of a smoothed-down stone. Another’s arm curves into itself, a bronze leaf. Mid-summer, they drink beer, people who know how salt from a living ocean tastes. Walt Whitman puts his hand over her husband’s chest. He tells her Ben’s heart speaks her name to his fingers. She is telling Ben about her day. Whitman’s hand waves at her from behind her husband’s head.


What would it take to ask them all back, to interrogate their motive, to double-check those days she knew them near—a back alley in Seattle, that tumble under a storm-driven wave? Maybe she had left them. Were they the home ground she could stray from? Would it take real desperation to get them to return? Would that seem contrived? Whitman takes no stand on this score, tugging at strands of his beard. He has had all he will take of her this afternoon, even as he mimics the posture of another self: Walt Whitman the mortal, days after his final stroke. He tries to lift an arm, settling instead on what he can see. The stitching of his quilt. The coat on a chair-back. Sunlight waking up the airborne dust of his room.