After
Louisiana
What
I now write I do not offer as any thing like a history of the
important events of the time, but rather as my memory of them,
the effect they had on me personally, and to what extent they
influenced my personal conduct. (Memoirs of General William
T. Sherman)
You
mean to tell me that after all the pine
and Spanish moss wisping from baldcypress,
after the cattle egrets and common egrets
and snowy egrets from swamps and rivers
and bayous through spicy breezes soaked
with scented blossoms headier than anything
a lady in summer décolletage might dab
behind her ears or hidden knees or
along her low neckline to cool the space
around her as she leans over, laughing, after
the wine and accents like vallies
next to flat Ohio vowels, leans over
to touch a blue sleeve with just enough
showing to make the local Tabasco
taste tepid and magnolia flowers
no match for her neck or shoulders
lighting the vacancy left by a family
waiting in another state, you mean to tell me
that even the scourge, the hun, the cruel barbarian,
even Satan himself could waste that landscape
without pools of remorse congealing inside him?
—Stephen
Cushman
-----------
The
Good Grey Poet
I
have stood in the snug little house
on
Mickle Street on the anniversary of your death
while
a woman read from your autopsy report,
heard
her list the contents of your stomach
and
bowels on that last day, testify
to
the brown solidity of your liver,
hear
witness, as though to shame the defamers,
to
the cleanliness of your life.
I
have sat at your tomb in the hillside
in
the shadow of the Catholic hospital
when
the breeze scattered sunlight
out
across the Cooper and traffic
on
Haddon Avenue was only a distant droning
as
of bees, and played you slow airs on a whistle—
"Parting
Glass" and "Journey's End"—
to
cheer you of a summer's day.
I
have flown north on the BQE at seventy,
on
a winter Sunday morning, with wind
grating
up whitecaps on the East River
like
snowdrops on a grey January lawn, high
above
the Brooklyn docks you knew,
on
my way to the north shore of the island
where
you early heard the musical shuttle
of
the mockingbird's throat weave song
amid
the mallow and sea oats.
I
have huffed in the mortal stink of that river
where,
crossing on the ferry to Manhattan,
you
spoke out across the centuries to me
and
the sons of my grandson's sons
and
the black bearded Hassidim of Brownsville alike
before
my father's father was formed of the dust.
The
atoms of your body are always found,
and
your loving soul, you who were young once,
engorged
with life, as I was young,
you
who grew old in pain and died,
as
I will die. I find you daily
under
my bootsoles in the Camden lots,
among
scraps of insulated wire,
the
glinting mica, the sandy mud,
the
indomitable weeds,
find
you in the laughter of working men
that
explodes like cannon fire from the city bars,
in
the clean and wholesome smiles of women,
in
the cryings of infants, the palsies of old men,
and
in the white gulls that wheel at dawn
above
the wide and sun-shocked Delaware.
—Joseph
Meredith
------------------
Walt,
the Wounded
The
whole world was there, plucking their linen,
half-bald,
mumbling, sucking on their moustache tips.
Broadway
was still in business and they asked no favors.
All
the cracked ribs of Fredericksburg,
the
boys who held their tongues at Chancellorsville,
as
the bandages, mule shit, skin and shot
overran
the Rappahannock's banks
and
poured it in our mouths
that
summer.
He
sat up half the night reading to the Army of the Potomac
poems
about trooping goats and crazy fathers
chewing
grass in the wilderness.
It's
me that saved his life, dear mother,
he
had dysentery, bronchitis, and something else
the doctors couldn't properly diagnose.
He's no different than the others.
I bring them letter-paper,
envelopes,
oranges, tobacco, jellies,
arrowroot,
gingersnaps, and shinplasters.
Last
night I was lucky enough
to
have ice cream for them all
and they love me each and every one.
The
early teachers stretched on canvas cots
with
their bad grammar, backs smeared by caissons,
a
heap of arms and legs junked beneath a tree
about
a load for a one-horse cart. At night,
campfires
peaked by shebangs in the bush.
He'd
find the stagedrivers laid up there—
Broadway
Joe, George Storms, Pop Rice, Handy Fish,
Old
Elephant and his brother Young Elephant (who came later),
Yellow
Joe, Julep Tarn, Tick Finn, and Patsy Dee—
the
pinched khaki drifting down the gangways,
homecomers
looking for those not waiting there,
bamboo
lays and punji sticks alive in their dreams.
A
small fire still burns in the nursery.
Rice
and molasses simmer on the stove.
Children
will have to learn to ask for less,
less
from the elephant dawn that chilled
across
the heights where Lee held his ground.
The
sky curled its wrath about the land
and
they brought America's fire home.
Fire
on our hands, ashes at Bull Run, buckets from Pleiku
while
he stood watching on the shore, pulling his beard.
