Always on the shore your presence, time and place in abeyance,
the hilltop fittingly named “High Hill” (suitably
for so singular a landmark on so flat an island) where you looked to sea –
how many miles till the earth curves away?
We think of you, born of parents born here from parents the same,
we too of parents born in your city, raised within a carriage ride to the sea.
We hear it today, gulls in the quiet ebb, that homeward summons. 
You walked this shore, drawn to the mockingbird’s song
of endless yearning.
 
Always we think of your song, leaving behind the plough lands of the Hempstead plain,
well plowed in recent years by the horseless carriage.
You had beginnings there, I know you did. We all did
in our numbers, our multitudes, the shouts of the children on the postwar playland 
for a nation a-childing, once more making new.
 
Your shoreland was lonelier, the bird’s yearning cry wrapped inside
     the endless tumble of the surf. 
You kept moving west, drawn to the crowds,
Finding your new sea, your schools to swim within 
     that city of churches, fast-building Brooklyn. 
In the city there are schools, talks, talkers, 
And when The Sage presides, you pay to hear him.
 
Trippers and seekers surround you. They want to know everything,
to discover by endless talk what you know by perception, 
       by existence itself.
You go and bathe, and admire yourself.
A woman waits for you, or for what you assume,
for what you assume I shall assume,
as surely a comrade does when you lay side by side 
one transparent summer morning, recalling 
“How you lay settled your head athwart my hips…” 
 
On the shore it’s March, another spring just barely begun,
but the sun is high, the vernal (never venial) equinox awaits,
boys making sudden leaps to catch those long-legged girls.
I, too, could tell secrets, whispers in the corners of my soul,
but in those days I have yet to learn what is secret, what is sacred.
Where were you, Walt, when people walked on the moon?
Did you assume that too, Walt? Did you assume the moon?