….And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was
on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food
nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the
next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll
slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as
directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same
cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was
inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night
I was happy. —Walt Whitman
Excerpt from “When I Heard at the Close of Day” from Leaves of Grass
I met my first lover the day I arrived in New Delhi in 1972. I had just turned nineteen, and I had come to India alone on pilgrimage, having been a student of traditional Hindu Tantra for nearly four years by that time. He was standing in a small group of fellow monks, all of them clad in ochre robes, but he stood out from the others, built solid like a wrestler with a boxer’s flattened nose and fierce gaze. When our eyes met briefly, a spark seemed to jump between us.
