"My father's cousin Rawley in the service, we got word,
and I think a neighbor's infant.
That was common.
My mother had lost one, too.
Then he went to town to join the war.
The Sheriff hold him home in an open rig, spat on the street,
been jailed a week or two.
She ran from the henhouse shrieking,
shaking eggs from the purse of her white apron to the ground.
Before I was born, he built a wide oak drain board
in the kitchen, didn't just glue the boards, screwed them down.
Glue held, one split in two.
My mother was an angel out of heaven.
My father was a viper.
I wished him dead, then he was dead.
But she was, too.
All day, one room, me and the cherubim with their wet kisses.
Without quarantines, who knew what was happening at home?
Was someone put to bed?
Had someone died?
The paper said how dangerous they
coughed and snuffed in their double desks facing me.
They sneezed and spit on books we passed around.
And on the boots, I tied, retied,
barely out of school myself, price at the front.
They smeared their lunch.
They had no handkerchiefs, no fresh water to wash my hands.
When the youngest started to cry, flushed and scared,
I just couldn't touch her.
I let her cry.
Their teacher, and I let them cry.
Dear Mattie, did you have the garden turned?
This morning early, while I took my watch,
I heard a wood sparrow.
The song is the same no matter what they call them over here.
Remember, too, when we were marching in the cottonwoods
and sycamores and potholes, how fond
they struck me coming from the ship
after so much empty flat gray sky on deck winds,
plowing up tremendous waves, and down below half the battalion
ill.
34 we left behind the sea, and more fell in the road.
It's what took Pug.
But there's enough of us still and brave enough
to finish this quickly off in hurry home.
You wiped a fever brow, you burned the cloth.
You scrubbed a sick room floor, you burned them up.
But wouldn't burn, you boiled, like applesauce,
out beside the shed in the copper pots.
Apple, lightwood, linen, featherbed,
it was the smell of that time that neighborhood.
All night, the pyre smoldered in the yard.
Your job, to obliterate what had been soiled.
But the beating heart no longer cares for risk.
They're all that are still passed
from lip to lip, the blessed relic, and the ritual cup.
To see in the pile the delicate pillars
slip she'd worked by hand, roses, and blue wreaths,
as if hope could be fed by giving up.
The barber, the teacher, the plumber, the preacher,
the man in a bowl or men in a cap, the banker, the baker,
the cabinet maker, the farm and postman, the clerk in the shop,
soldier and sailor, teamster and tailor,
man shoveling snow or sweeping his step,
carpenter, cobbler, liar, lawyer laid them down and never got
up.
Oh, oh, the world wouldn't stop.
The neighborhood grocer, the neighborhood cop,
laid them down and never did rise.
And some of their children and some of their wives
fell into bed and never got up, fell into bed and never got up.
Oh, yes, I used to pray.
I prayed for the baby.
I prayed for my mortal soul as it contracted.
I prayed a gun would happen into my hand.
I prayed the way our nearest neighbors prayed, head down,
hands wrung, knees on the hard floor.
They all were sick.
And prayed to the merciful Father to send an angel,
and my Henry came.
"The least of these," my brethren Henry said.
"Wherefore by my fruits," Henry said.
All of them survived, and do you think they're still praying,
thank you, Lord, for Henry?
She was so tiny, we kept her in a shoe box on the cookstove,
like a kitten.
Dear Mat, for the red scarf, I'm much obliged.
At first, I couldn't wear it.
Bright colors draw fire, but now I can.
We took a shell, but three of us were washing out our socks
in a crater near my post.
Good thing, the sock was off my foot
since the foot's all to pieces now.
Don't you fret.
It could have been my head.
I've seen that here.
And then what use would be your pretty scarf?
The nurse bundles me up like an old man or boy
and wheels me off the ward, so many sick.
But the enemy suffers worse.
Thanks to our god damn guns, as Pug would say.
Victory will come soon but without me.
Once the world had had its fill of war, in a secret wood,
as the countryside lay stunned, at the hour
of the wolf and the vole, in a railroad car,
the generals met and put their weapons down.
Like spring and buzz, as word passed
over all the pocked and riven ground
and underground, now the nation sat in a gilded hall,
divining what they'd keep of what they'd won.
And so their armies could be done with war,
and soldiers trickled home to study peace.
But they all gardens grew a tough new weed.
And the old lives didn't fit as they had before.
And where they'd been the dream, a stranger's face.
And where they'd been the war, an empty sleeve."