Antaeus No. 73/74, Spring 1994 - Who’s Writing This: Notations on the… (1994)

{Note:
The following epigraph may appear in Handler's similarly-titled 1995 anthology, rather than to the Spring 1994 volume of Antæus magazine, No. 73/74.}

As I ebbed with the ocean of life,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walked where the sea-riplles wash you, Paumanok,
Where they rustle up, hoarse and sibilant,
Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,
I, musing, late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,
Alone, held by the eternal self of me that threatens to get the better of me, and stifle me,
Was seized by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,
In the rim, the sediment, that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.

Fascinated, my eyes, reverting from the south, dropped, to follow those slender windrows,
Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
Paumanok, there and then, as I thought the old thought of likenesses,
These you presented to me, you fish-shaped island,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walked with that eternal self of me, seeking types.

-Walt Whitman