502 War poems

Sent in after new ground was taken, my father ducked from ditch to shell-hole, unwinding the telephone cable behind him, a pfc. cast as Mercury, connecting the gods with the lesser gods. Funny to think of him trailing the complex filament of speech, that man, neither shy nor sullen, who answered only “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” and never volunteered a private thought. Standing off with his hands in his pockets or cupping a cigarette, he seemed to be waiting with the great rural patience of fields for whatever might rise pure and nameless or fall from the sky beyond explanation. If anyone asked what he was thinking, he said, “Nothing,” and when he died he rushed out leaving everything unsaid, uncoiling a dark line into darkness down which a familiar silence roars.

for Hank The General’s men sit at the door. Her eyes Are fat with belladonna. She’s naked Except for the small painted turtles That are drinking a flammable cloud Of rum and milk from her navel. The ships out in the harbor Are loosely allied Like casks floating in bilge. The occasional light on a ship Winks. In the empty room of the manuscript Someone is grooming you For the long entrance into the dark city. They’ll hang the General. Then with torches they’ll search for his children. Men and women Are seen jumping from the burning hotel. Journalists, in no hurry, Elect to take the elevator. They walk Out of the building, stepping over corpses. . . You are listening to loud bells. The corpses get up and follow the journalists. It’s unfair that while rehearsing For death they actually succumbed to it. But no one sobs. Shirts and dresses billowing as they fall. Something inhuman in you watched it all. And whatever it is that watches, It has kept you from loneliness like a mob.

All things belie me, I think, but I look at them though. Well boys, at least you’re not dead, right? What’s the date today? Until something. What? Of the lady of the whitening blow. I’m ashamed to keep on babbling as if I’ve always been oneself, diamond flow through. Humble flannel skeleton. Grin, laugh unbecoming Living at the bottom of the water may have been obvious all the time. But I forget. What’s my plot? Hand of a child, paw of an animal. Paint it red & make a pawprint in the psalter. Protect her & give her back her hat Entangle her dreams in demotic and Warm her feet; cheat the judge & protect the tree from which he was carved. * And now that I’ve explained the situation Jesus my frame hurts, you say. Fucking pain. Hey come & empty my ashtray once more & don’t get so excited. A gentle heart was broken. Whose? No one’s It’s a figure like a frame among medlars & briars. Hand me that piece of that, just that, yeah. I don’t mean it, I’ve never meant anything because that’s not what I do, in the mountains I call home How can I tell you of my wound? it’s round & silver & headstrong, it’s nothing more than temperament born of a custom involving a circuitous journey This is all wrong. It rains today, my son’s singing love songs of this country, already being ten. * And if to withstand this nocturnal pollution of the tiny wanton stars with bent hook clauses of misprision I’m supposed to sing the melody of an unexpecting part. . . Hey a pretty honey come a listen to me while I evening, darling, your messages, what would you think then? But I wouldn’t do that. Light surrounded oranges towels clouds. You don’t think you’re my you. Not here not you. You still think you’re he. she. Because I wouldn’t “you” you, would I? I only “you” some other he. she. I who write poems. When she writes them, it’s different. . .A world of words, right? It’s only my version of The Entertainer Nothing truly personal, I’m way above that. I’ve learned about it for a lot of days. I’ve been to see the doctor & you have to have shots for it. 17 balls of yarn & a sewing machine. * No I wouldn’t know why anyone would want to write like that. I should never have had to do it. We were used to this other thing we always know like when we’re here. And you have this clear head & you’re seeing things & there they are. You don’t notice they’re spelled. That’s how you know you’re alive. I never saw you

Your landscape sickens with a dry disease Even in May, Virginia, and your sweet pines Like Frenchmen runted in a hundred wars Are of a child’s height in these battlefields. For Wilson sowed his teeth where generals prayed —High-sounding Lafayette and sick-eyed Lee— The loud Elizabethan crashed your swamps Like elephants and the subtle Indian fell. Is it for love, you ancient-minded towns, That on the tidy grass of your great graves And on your roads and riverways serene Between the corn with green flags in a row, Wheat amorous as hair and hills like breasts Each generation, ignorant of the last, Mumbling in sheds, embarrassed to salute, Comes back to choke on etiquette of hate? You manufacture history like jute— Labor is cheap, Virginia, for high deeds, But in your British dream of reputation The black man is your conscience and your cost. Here on the plains perfect for civil war The clapboard city like a weak mirage Of order rises from the sand to house These thousands and the paranoid Monroe; The sunrise gun rasps in the throat of heaven; The lungs of dawn are heavy and corrupt; We hawk and spit; our flag walks through the air Breathing hysteria thickly in each face. Through the long school of day, absent in heart, Distant in every thought but self we tread, Wheeling in blocks like large expensive toys That never understand except through fun. To steal aside as aimlessly as curs Is our desire; to stare at corporals As sceptically as boys; not to believe The misty-eyed letter and the cheap snapshot. To cross the unnatural frontier of your name Is our free dream, Virginia, and beyond, White and unpatriotic in our beds, To rise from sleep like driftwood out of surf. But stricter than parole is this same wall And these green clothes, a secret on the fields, In towns betray us to the arresting touch Of lady-wardens, good and evil wives. And far and fabulous is the word “Outside” Like “Europe” when the midnight liners sailed, Leaving a wake of ermine on the tide Where rubies drowned and eyes were softly drunk. Still we abhor your news and every voice Except the Personal Enemy’s, and songs That pumped by the great central heart of love On tides of energy at evening come. Instinctively to break your compact law Box within box, Virginia, and throw down The dangerous bright habits of pure form We struggle hideously and cry for fear. And like a very tired whore who stands Wrapped in the sensual crimson of her art High in the tired doorway of a street And beckons half-concealed the passerby, The sun, Virginia, on your Western stairs Pauses and smiles away between the trees, Motioning the soldier overhill to town To his determined hungry burst of joy.

We’d gained our first objective hours before While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes, Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke. Things seemed all right at first. We held their line, With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed, And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench. The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud, Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled; And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair, Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime. And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain! A yawning soldier knelt against the bank, Staring across the morning blear with fog; He wondered when the Allemands would get busy; And then, of course, they started with five-nines Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud. Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell, While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke. He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead. An officer came blundering down the trench: “Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ... Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!” Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left; And stumbling figures looming out in front. “O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat, And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ... And started blazing wildly ... then a bang Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ... Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come, were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two, the youngest assistant curator in the country. I had some good ideas in those days. Well, what we did was this. We had boxes precisely built to every size of canvas. We put the boxes in the basement and waited. When word came that the Germans were coming in, we got each painting put in the proper box and out of Leningrad in less than a week. They were stored somewhere in southern Russia. But what we did, you see, besides the boxes waiting in the basement, which was fine, a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art— but what we did was leave the frames hanging, so after the war it would be a simple thing to put the paintings back where they belonged. Nothing will seem surprised or sad again compared to those imperious, vacant frames. Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream— You know it lasted nine hundred days. Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie sometimes a foot deep on this very floor, but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell. Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you. Early one day, a dark December morning, we came on three young soldiers waiting outside, pacing and swinging their arms against the cold. They told us this: in three homes far from here all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad to see the Hermitage, as they supposed every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing. Now they had been sent to defend the city, a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe. I had to tell them there was nothing to see but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung. “Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.” And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger than all of us being here in the first place, inside such a building, strolling in snow. We led them around most of the major rooms, what they could take the time for, wall by wall. Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them part of what they would see if they saw the paintings. I told them how those colors would come together, described a brushstroke here, a dollop there, mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout and why this painter got the roses wrong. The next day a dozen waited for us, then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes. Each of us took a group in a different direction: Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse, Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer, Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper. We pointed to more details about the paintings, I venture to say, than if we had had them there, some unexpected use of line or light, balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces the same way we’d done it every morning before the war, but then we didn’t pay so much attention to what we talked about. People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings. But now the guide and the listeners paid attention to everything—the simple differences between the first and post-impressionists, romantic and heroic, shade and shadow. Maybe this was a way to forget the war a little while. Maybe more than that. Whatever it was, the people continued to come. It came to be called The Unseen Collection. Here. Here is the story I want to tell you. Slowly, blind people began to come. A few at first then more of them every morning, some led and some alone, some swaying a little. They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces, they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them, to see better what was being said. And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention. After the siege was lifted and the Germans left and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places, the blind never came again. Not like before. This seems strange, but what I think it was, they couldn’t see the paintings anymore. They could still have listened, but the lectures became a little matter-of-fact. What can I say? Confluences come when they will and they go away.

Unreel the human weave to molten stone And still you’ll find the upraised arm of  Cain. The hand that rigged the flesh in Abu Ghraib Caressed another’s for the feel of  home.

Not yet will those measureless fields be green again Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed; There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain, Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread. But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled, We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column's head. And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things Speaking so wistfully of other Springs From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred. In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers To lovers—to mothers Here, too, lies he: Under the purple, the green, the red, It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed! Only, when all is done and said, God is not mocked and neither are the dead. For this will stand in our Market-place— Who'll sell, who'll buy (Will you or I Lie each to each with the better grace)? While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face As they drive their bargains, is the Face Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

In the glad revels, in the happy fêtes, When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled With the sweet wine of France that concentrates The sunshine and the beauty of the world, Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth, To those whose blood, in pious duty shed, Hallows the soil where that same wine had birth. Here, by devoted comrades laid away, Along our lines they slumber where they fell, Beside the crater at the Ferme d’Alger And up the bloody slopes of La Pompelle, And round the city whose cathedral towers The enemies of Beauty dared profane, And in the mat of multicolored flowers That clothe the sunny chalk-fields of Champagne. Under the little crosses where they rise The soldier rests. Now round him undismayed The cannon thunders, and at night he lies At peace beneath the eternal fusillade ... That other generations might possess— From shame and menace free in years to come— A richer heritage of happiness, He marched to that heroic martyrdom. Esteeming less the forfeit that he paid Than undishonored that his flag might float Over the towers of liberty, he made His breast the bulwark and his blood the moat. Obscurely sacrificed, his nameless tomb, Bare of the sculptor’s art, the poet’s lines, Summer shall flush with poppy-fields in bloom, And Autumn yellow with maturing vines. There the grape-pickers at their harvesting Shall lightly tread and load their wicker trays, Blessing his memory as they toil and sing In the slant sunshine of October days ... I love to think that if my blood should be So privileged to sink where his has sunk, I shall not pass from Earth entirely, But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk, And faces that the joys of living fill Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer, In beaming cups some spark of me shall still Brim toward the lips that once I held so dear. So shall one coveting no higher plane Than nature clothes in color and flesh and tone, Even from the grave put upward to attain The dreams youth cherished and missed and might have known; And that strong need that strove unsatisfied Toward earthly beauty in all forms it wore, Not death itself shall utterly divide From the belovèd shapes it thirsted for. Alas, how many an adept for whose arms Life held delicious offerings perished here, How many in the prime of all that charms, Crowned with all gifts that conquer and endear! Honor them not so much with tears and flowers, But you with whom the sweet fulfilment lies, Where in the anguish of atrocious hours Turned their last thoughts and closed their dying eyes, Rather when music on bright gatherings lays Its tender spell, and joy is uppermost, Be mindful of the men they were, and raise Your glasses to them in one silent toast. Drink to them—amorous of dear Earth as well, They asked no tribute lovelier than this— And in the wine that ripened where they fell, Oh, frame your lips as though it were a kiss.

Soldiers never do die well; Crosses mark the places— Wooden crosses where they fell, Stuck above their faces. Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch— All the world roars red and black; Soldiers smother in a ditch, Choking through the whole attack.