Judson Evans

Postcard from Whitman’s Grave

Camden, NJ, Oct. 30, 1998

I’ll allow myself more space between the dotted lines, since Walt wouldn’t crimp or crowd like this. His final one room house with so little room to it. Mortar of snow and the door left open. A single wooden chair-back to damp corner. Beard of in-blown leaves. Black and white can’t capture the grave-ground mauled by backhoe, or skeletal sound of beech leaves shivering—kite whistle along little sailboat ribs of veins. Grey scale of top-heavy pyramid all attic and pharaoh-thick walls. Fluttering pages of light through the grate, shred of a flag stolen for an osprey nest.

granite roofbeams
his book set
on its end covers

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About the Author

Judson Evans is a full-time Professor of Liberal Arts at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches poetry workshops focusing on haiku, haibun, and renku, and a visual studies course on Paleolithic cave art. His collaborative book of lyric poems responding to cave painting, Chalk Song, was published by Lilly Press, Boston, in fall 2021. He recently became co-editor of haibun for Frogpond.