On Beauty
BY NATHAN BLANSETT
Emory University, ’19
2015 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors List
Earlier in the evening, your hands
encasing my face, I tell you about the year
Walt Whitman was a schoolteacher
on the shore of Long Island. We pause
to admire a daguerreotype of him
done in youth, now reproduced as a print
in one of the books we keep by the bed.
His face, you say, looks like mine
the time I lay all curled orchid, all odalisque—
as if that was long ago, as if that wasn’t just this morning.
For a moment, your face is the same marbled and ignorant beauty
from that hour, not knowing
that after the village learned of Whitman’s affair
with a man, they slicked him with tar
and seared each feather into his skin
delicately, their mouths moving
in prayer.
