WHITMAN / VITMAN
by Richard Fein
If you had been Velvl Vitman, I'd have
turned your Yiddish into English, I
poking around in the circuits of your beard,
my fingers finding and tracing your face,
my palms grazing your ruddy flesh,
your body and movements affecting me
and my characters, my strokes, and my lines;
the tones of the syllables, and pauses,
and the corresponding flecks of our words
make a marriage between us, my English
coming off of your Yiddish, tongue to tongue,
you then closer to me than ever before.
Of if I was Ruvn-Yankev Fayn and you still
Walt Whitman, I'd have turned your English
into Yiddish, showing how the body
of a poem could turn into another body,
the two of us closer than ever,
the way V inheres in W.
from Losing It (2021)
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