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