What About Walt Whitman?

Imagine going through life without a mask.
Your friend drops by to deliver dinner,
Dinner is a mask for do me a favor. She talks.
You can see her lips move. You breathe
her air. Her air is a mask for whatever
she projects with her words. Whatever
is a mask for virus. You feel safe because
you and she are both vaccinated. You feel unsafe
because you’ve practiced at risk for a year.
Practiced is a mask. This masking happened
without giving you time to practice. You
is a mask for first person singular. I is
the person unmasked.
I learned masking
even before the pandemic. The truth is I
can’t imagine life unmasked. That would take
practice, short intervals, maybe five minutes
a day. Imagine a poem raw and unrevised,
a journal entry cut up into lines. No more
masking than that. As if words are not a mask.
Walt Whitman let loose a barbaric yawp
though he unmasked it only near the end

of Song of Myself. The mask slipped
beneath his nose only once.
He quickly recovered.

Margaret Rozga’s fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021). As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate she co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021).