I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

These lines come from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California” (written 1955), a Beat-era meditation that imagines the poet encountering the spirit of Walt Whitman in a modern American supermarket. Composed in the same period as “Howl,” the poem uses a nocturnal, dreamlike walk through consumer space to stage a conversation with Whitman—Ginsberg’s major poetic forebear and a symbol of democratic, bodily, and homoerotic candor. By placing Whitman amid packaged meats, produce, and “grocery boys,” Ginsberg contrasts Whitman’s expansive 19th‑century vision with mid‑20th‑century abundance, conformity, and commodification, while also registering Ginsberg’s own loneliness and desire.

Ginsberg’s Whitman is both revered ancestor and poignantly diminished apparition: “childless, lonely” and reduced to a shopper “poking among the meats.” The comic questions (“Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?”) expose the hidden violence and economics beneath everyday consumption, while “Are you my Angel?” turns the encounter into a plea for guidance, blessing, and companionship—poetic and erotic. The supermarket becomes a modern pastoral where democratic desire is rerouted through commodities; Ginsberg measures what has been lost (public intimacy, spiritual largeness) and what persists (longing, comradeship, the search for a sustaining American song).