Spontaneous Me

1SPONTANEOUS me, Nature,

2The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,

3The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,

4The hill-side whiten’d with blossoms of the mountain ash,

5The same, late in autumn—the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark

6 green,

7The rich coverlid of the grass—animals and birds—the private untrimm’d

8 bank—the primitive apples—the pebble-stones,

9Beautiful dripping fragments—the negligent list of one after another, as I happen to

10 call them to me, or think of them,

11The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)

12The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,

13This poem, drooping shy and unseen, that I always carry, and that all men carry,

14(Know, once for all, avow’d on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty,

15 lurking, masculine poems;)

16Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers, and the climbing sap,

17Arms and hands of love—lips of love—phallic thumb of love—breasts of

18 love—bellies press’d and glued together with love,

19Earth of chaste love—life that is only life after love,

20The body of my love—the body of the woman I love—the body of the man—the

21 body of the earth,

22Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,

23The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down—that gripes the full-grown

24 lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes his will of her, and holds

25 himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied,

26The wet of woods through the early hours,

27Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with an arm slanting down

28 across and below the waist of the other,

29The smell of apples, aromas from crush’d sage-plant, mint, birch-bark,

30The boy’s longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what he was dreaming,

31The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl, and falling still and content to the ground,

32The no-form’d stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with,

33The hubb’d sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any one,

34The sensitive, orbic, underlapp’d brothers, that only privileged feelers may be

35 intimate where they are,

36The curious roamer, the hand, roaming all over the body—the bashful withdrawing of

37 flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and edge themselves,

38The limpid liquid within the young man,

39The vexed corrosion, so pensive and so painful,

40The torment—the irritable tide that will not be at rest,

41The like of the same I feel—the like of the same in others,

42The young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that flushes and flushes,

43The young man that wakes, deep at night, the hot hand seeking to repress what would master

44 him;

45The mystic amorous night—the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,

46The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers—the young man all

47 color’d, red, ashamed, angry;

48The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked,

49The merriment of the twin-babes that crawl over the grass in the sun, the mother never

50 turning her vigilant eyes from them,

51The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen’d long-round walnuts;

52The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,

53The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent, while birds and

54 animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent;

55The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity,

56The oath of procreation I have sworn—my Adamic and fresh daughters,

57The greed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw, till I saturate what shall produce

58 boys to fill my place when I am through,

59The wholesome relief, repose, content;

60And this bunch, pluck’d at random from myself;

61It has done its work—I tossed it carelessly to fall where it may.