The Ice Harp by Norman Lock

Author:Norman Lock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

“Et cetera, et cetera.”

Walt carefully folds the letter, and, as he gives me a mischievous wink, he kisses the paper and returns it to his wallet.

“Well, Waldo, what do you have to say for yourself ? Respondez! Respondez!”

“That I’ve lived to regret my initial enthusiasm. It has worn thin—as thin as that piece of writing paper.”

“Without enthusiasm, what is a man?”

“Your work strikes me as that of a poet not yet fully grown, albeit ‘The Wound Dresser’ and ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ are very fine. They show a man annealed by immense sorrow—a genuine pity that has saved you from being seen merely as a chronicler of facts.”

“What would you have me do, Emerson? Poke among the veils with a eunuch’s sapless wand?”

“Your verses can seem like an exordium of declarations and assertions that awaken in me sentiments better suited to needlepointed mottoes for a parlor wall.”

Walt stands and rolls up a sleeve.

“Whitman, we’re too old for fisticuffs!”

“But not too old for a contest of strength—you and I being about equally feeble.”

He sits beside me and plants an elbow on the table.

“I mean to arm-wrestle you, you lily-livered school-marm. See if I don’t make you cry, ‘Uncle’!”

“You’ve already had two strokes, you ‘mere white curd of ass’s milk,’ to quote Alexander Pope.”

“You mealymouthed pedant!”

“A third will carry you off.”

“You can roll me up in your Turkey carpet and carry me out death’s door, so long as you take back your insults!”

“Damn you, Whitman!”

“Emerson, take them back!”

“I will do no such thing! I sent Carlyle a copy of your 1856 edition and invited him to light his pipe with it.”

“Fight me.”

“No!”

“Coward.”

I sigh, already defeated. His eyes are hectic, his lips curled in a sneer. Even at sixty, he appears formidable, a type of Jeremiah or Ezekiel. I feel about as hearty as Ichabod Crane.

I roll up my sleeve and grip his hand in mine. The veins in our arms push through the skin; the old blood moves according to the tired heart’s impulse. The muscles in Walt’s arm are stringy; mine seem to have preceded me into the grave.

“On the count of ten, professor … One little Indian, two little Indians, three little Indian boys.”

He pulls my arm down onto the table with sufficient force to startle the unfinished poem.

“Ho ho!”

“You jumped the gun, Walt!”

“Don’t be such a namby-pamby puritan!”

He slaps the tabletop and offers me a second chance.

I struggle awhile, and then, struck by the lunacy of this engagement of old men, I let him have his way. My knuckles thump. Walt beams in triumph, scratches his beard with all his nails, throws back his massive head, and laughs as boys do who have been caught acting foolishly and hope to brave it out.

“We’re too old for this horseshit, Waldo!”

“Walter, would you care for a drink?”

I lay my hand lightly on his sleeve as I did at Boston Common nearly twenty years ago, when I tried to convince him to take the sex out of “Children of Adam.

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