Corner of Guilford and 29th St.

-Tuesday, August 6th, 10 am-

On such a day as today

everything is just as it is.

Hello, you, drinking beer on your stoop;

and you, bumping songs of teenage lust

from your double-parked Buick; you, walking

three dogs; you, dogs; you, dead dragonfly

belly-up on the sidewalk;

you, sun that bakes the dragonfly

and turns my face the color

of the fish-killing algae in the harbor;

you, hot wind full of the smell of dead fish;

and you—yes, you—

listen: I know you: I am you. Help me

summon the ghost of Walt Whitman!

Let us raise Walt’s effigy

above the Washington Monument,

let us rest together in the shade of his hat!

Let his prodigious beard be Baltimore,

and each one of us

as unique and interchangeable

as hairs in that beard.

Poem by Matthew Falk