Walt Whitman Visits Fabrizio Frosini

A Fantasy for Fabrizio A foot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before meleading me wherever I choose. I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune. Walt Whitman Yes, me, American to the core, Poet of the Open Road! That means a life of walking, hiking, trudging, trekking, sauntering, oh, and loafing from time to time. But in your time people race in vehicles, no time left topursue the life of the roads. They are always disappearing behind you. My favorite roads wind along the wavy path parallel to a great river. No short cuts, no straight lines. It keeps you nimble and and alert, both body and soul engaged. Roads are curious characters, like you and me. They want to know everything about the world they occupy, so they twist and bend, circle and spiral, imprinting by movement itself their landscapes in memories. They rejoice in the upward climb and the downward rush. We poets take time to walk. There is no destination more important than each curve, eachbump of the road itself. The roads know thngs only perpetual journeyers learn. What visions, what new selves will be realized by the journey! We must carry both flesh and spirit across land and water and air toward whatever destination for us is marked on the inner map of our existence. And that dark spirit, that soul that propels us from within, must be matched by a free mind, eating the light, and plotting a direct path through daylight and night. Such is the double vision of our being. The roads delight in hugging the edges of meadows and smelling the scents of teeming wildflowers. They slow down and rest in the shade of flourishing great trees. But inevitably the heights summon them. When they arrive on the highest platau, they circle around and around, making shifting patterns in the ground that later journeyers will see as hieratic, and invest with solemn meanings.You and I are among those later journeyers, and we nudge our lives forward by ascent and descent. Again visions will flood our consciousnes, and new selves will assume new roles they will play with serious levity or laughing intensity. Still many carry home only their old selves, and complain about the weight they fear to disgard. But we let the the air dissolve our old selves and delight in our new, supple, spacious selves. Oh, does not space become time in these heights? Do we not lavish our eyes with brightening vistas, even as we stand, rapt and silent, occupying a moment endlessly extended, as if it were a road forever open to eternity... What will I say in departing? Perhaps it should be a gesture: a shrug of my shoulders, a waving of both hands, like a crazy fellow, a deep bow, as if I were again playing the fool? But, no, it must be a farewell of words, because we are poets, and the words we speak and write we have borrowed from past eons and future eons will borrow them from us. The words, the words, Fabrizio! Spill them, toss them, give them as gifts to children, lend them to the tongue-tied lover, teach the angry man to use them instead of his fists, help the lonely connect with them. Fabrizio, my new and very old friend, fare thee well!