Looking at Pictures of Civil War Soldiers


I cannot help but try to bring them back to life.
Imagine the air around them in color.
Imagine them inhaling it.

I strain to hear their voices, recreated
on the basis of the tint of their uniforms
and the shape of their mouths.

I think of their women
inserting clean thin fingers into their hair,
sending their cold marble eyes
with their etched irises
rolling heavenward.
Forcing a promise to hurry home,
to write letters in verse until they do.

The final photograph before departure,
Brady breathing terror and pride 
through a primitive camera.

Imagine them asleep.
Imagine them laughing,
loosing slender ropes of urine 
on frozen vegetation far from their homes.
Imagine them drunk and wonder
how they disposed of their lust
in between attempts on their lives.

I even picture them curled up at night,
wriggling for a space in between the 
jagged January winds, 
eyes shut tight, fingers stuck together,
long mustaches crisp with stiff snot,
haunted by their own voices
calling out from the enemy’s camp.
All the bravado blown away.
Whimpering into the dirt, as I know I would.

After hours of scrutiny I turn my gaze
on myself, looking
long and hard in the mirror.
I look at my hands, my wrists, 
my forehead, my brow and the life in my lips.

I do not search for similarities, 
the way I do when I look at them.
When I look at myself I search 
for signs of change, of lessons learned
in the generations separating us,
of precepts deposited in my living skin.
I search for signs of significant evolution
in the intervening centuries.

Finding none, I close my eyes and 
coat my face with frost or blood 
or dust until I cannot tell us
apart anymore.

And this is when I feel I
understand them least.


​

Walt Whitman Held Me


He was not quite what he was to become.
A fleshy, fierce-eyed vision, he held me
down while they took off my arm. That morning

its putrescence woke me; that afternoon
I strained against leather straps while they picked

out bits of bone (particles in a jar
next to his book upon my mantle). He

stood at my head, leaned down over my face,
hushing me as I groaned into his breast.

My breath was chloroform; his smock sweat and
white water. He was my mother and my 

father, a saint whose several arms were God’s.
Panting, saturated with my purple 

blood, he left me heavier than when he’d come.





Valley of Ashes


We have made our home in the arid heart
of what they call the Valley of Ashes,
where we reap a sifting gray harvest far
in advance of the decade-long process
of self-incineration the city
outside is enjoying. Eyes and mouths closed,
we have made love beneath the pale spirit
of a sheet, and after each scant repast
we have smiled, sucking on a peppermint
apiece. Shapes hide, waiting to be picked out,
in the white smoke gushing from the stacks. Men
count slow barges at midday, staring out
their windows. And we sit here laughing, in a kitchen
painted yellow, counting ash-coated coins like blessings.


Summers in Gaul

I
The moment we crossed back over the Rhine I felt that the unknown had at last been circumscribed. I was no longer afraid.

We broke rank and threw our armor to the earth. We squatted on the riverbank, slicked back our hair with the green water and rubbed silt into our scalps.

The centuries began to mingle. We were boys again, rocking on our heels and laughing at our impossible luck. The horses swatted at their flanks with burr-riddled tails.

Then he rode by.

He parted the sunlight like a curtain before him. He was watching the men as they dismantled the bridge. We bellowed his name; he smiled and turned to trot on ahead.

This was when we began to love him, to feel that we existed beneath the palm of a god that shielded us for as long as his cause was our own.

II

Here, under my own roof, I remember summers in Gaul, long days spent foraging for food and hallucinating tall pale figures in dark and susurrous forests.

I see gleaned fields gleaming under a waxing moon and feel the ache and itch of ancient wounds that I cherished long after the rewards they netted me were spent. 

I feel the men and the boys trembling on either side of me in those eternal silent seconds just before the order comes. I stomp in puddles of blood on the grass and I slip and fall into a river of crooked limbs, bathing in carnage and dying of thirst.

And I remember how the end of the campaign season arrived all at once, overnight almost, the breeze suddenly bitter and the leaves rattling in a suddenly gray wilderness. I remember the spaces between the leaves and the way the leaves died and turned the color of the barbarous enemy’s flesh. I remember it all; whole tribes of dead leaves rush through my dreams.

III

While she reaches out for me from the other side of the bed I return to the Rhine, frozen now by the cold that reclaims what we conquered. I crouch on the stiff white grass and hear, just below the wind, the sound of warm air stalling in my children’s faces before it finds its way to their chests.

I am waiting for him to return.

My fingers clench icy coils of hair; I peer at the other bank between my forearms and shiver inside ill-fitting armor. I know somehow that he is coming, that he will arrive before the frost starts its crawl toward my core.

I will rise as his horse appears, approaching phantomlike through the snow. I will peer up into the darkling face of the rider and I will not need to speak.

I will not need to ask him for my orders; I will not ask how I am to carry on through this vengeful season now that the great hand that guided me has been withdrawn. He must know now what it is to be unshielded and afraid.

He will tell me what to do.

He will know.





Next Lives

​
I will be a bearded stranger
approaching slowly, in a cart.
You will be beating a rug,
lost in a swarm of trodden dust,
when I ride up and ask for a glass
of water. You will wince and stammer
an apology, knuckles kneading
your eyes, and I will insist
that you pay me no mind, that I
forgive you your broken pump,
that the creek a mile off will do
just fine. And when I take up
the reins and ready to move on,
you will be there by the lane, the rug
rippling behind you, charged with
your memory. You will look up
at me; I will look down at you.
You will be small and inexplicable,
a sapling forking a familiar path.
I will be a slim form bisecting your sky.