My little notebooks were beginnings - they were the ground into which I dropped the seed... I would work in this way when I was out in the crowds, then put the stuff together at home.
My ties and ballasts leave me - I travel - I sail - My elbows rest in the sea-gaps. I skirt the sierras. My palms cover continents - I am afoot with my vision.
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less,
it comes or it lags behind,
It comes from its embowered garden
and looks pleasantly on itself and encloses the world.
I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, All all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward.
Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems