Entering History

Five days have passed; five days with the length

of five long nights, and nothing has changed,

not I, not my brother’s mind, not the world’s.

It takes ten days, the duty sergeant said,

for discharge papers, and I unpacked, and waited.

Mornings, I sketch boats nodding on the sun.

Nights, I study a rare collection of antebellum mansions

drawling around a quiet port with the musky smell

of Hepplewhite and Adam on their breath.Afternoons,

I spend at the Base Dispensary, waiting to see my brother,

driving the eight-mile hyphen between morning and night

cocooned in the car radio’s full-volume bravado.

At the sentry box I present my Visitor Pass,

reserved for families of graduates, the injured,

the suicidal.

Inside the Island’s barbered tropics,

crew-cut grass, and topped palm trees hung

with hanks of untamed Spanish moss, muster

in precision through azaleas and birds of paradise.

Signs coming and going on the roadways boast

WE TRAIN THE WORLD’S BEST KILLERS, and platoons,

fresh from bayoneting sandbag bodies, scoring

hits on pop-up, plywood humans, drill and stomp

to breakfast, lunch and dinner shouting

Oh yeah, Oh yeah, ready to fight, ready

to die, ready to kill with all our will!

Oh yeah, Oh yeah. . . .

And I retreat to Beaufort and talk to ghosts,

drawing comfort from Federal and Greek Revival dwellings,

water-turned, catching breezes under discreetly-raised,

white-columned porches, each a temple to love

because Miss Judith (shall we call her),

slept six months with Sherman to save her town

from burning, or just because.In any case,

the town was saved, to its everlasting shame.

It endures, a tribute to the act of love,

without honor, and curves around the bay

like dirty linen for all the world to wonder

why it is the only town left untouched in all the path

of Sherman’s holocaustic march.

And, Miss Judith?

Was she the fairest and purest? Or, maybe

a young widow of three years and four months?

Could the town do nothing to stop the collaboration,

or did it not want to? Where is honor in a place

captured and occupied?Consider the consequences:

She climbed into Sherman’s bed, he didn’t torch the place,

she was shunned, and the town became sire and heir of its shame.

When Sherman withdrew, he left plugged in his place, a dildo

of memory, each spared house, a mark of collaboration,

a tabby A on its chest, sealing the town in a borrowed time.

Such a nice girl, the whisper runs down to this day.

From one of our finest families, too.And he was

no gentleman!

Ah, General. Cump, I understand

they call you—if I may be so familiar—for Tecumseh.A coup,

a stroke of genius hoisting them on your blade, dangling

with the thought they honored you by their mere existence.

Your face is saved in theirs, and their face,

unbaptized by the cleansing fire, is ruined.

How you must have loved looking back as you

and your army rode away, seeing your manhood risen

tattletale white and glistening in the sun—not just one,

but ten, twenty, forty houses with your seed

pulsing through their halls and English basements,

joining you to them, for so long as they shall stand.

What more could any man want?Did you know

fire would make them victims, that survival would destroy

their face more than fire, would leave them sipping bourbon

on upstairs wooden porches staring off to sea

for generations, rocking tangled feelings

in complaining wicker chairs, dwelling endlessly

in their dwelling in their dwelling

Or do I wrong him?Was the town

his parting gift to Judith, given out of love?He did

like giving towns as gifts; Savannah’s destruction

he called his “Christmas gift” to Lincoln.The destruction

of other towns, he called “gifts” to General Grant.

Or were the houses, turned into hospitals, spared

because they still held the Union wounded.What was it Cump?

Tell me it was love.Tell me it was a touch of the man

peering through the soldier.And to her I whisper,

What made you do it? Why, when he lay in your arms,

gentled, legs weakened, unmanned, didn’t you

behead him?There she is, in the shadows, looking at me

amused.Oh, but then she’s gone.Don’t leave!

I need to know.But what does it matter?

The North and the South lay down together, enemy

with enemy, with the whole town desiring it,

feeling themselves traitors because of their desire

and, when the two sides rose, the town still stood.

Now, its peccant splendor harbors me,

gives me sanctuary against my anxious days.

It nourishes, feeds, and houses me, this town

twice occupied.Not alone the Union Army,

but now by Marines from the Base, who traffic

like unowned ghosts through the wall of preoccupation.

The town’s conditioned left-hand, once again,

money-changes war into room and board, and that

little extra, a coat of paint, new front steps,

even a little AT&T.Compromise is still

their grits and bourbon, and the spared houses

cast flat, oblong shadows like coffin lids

over bumpy brick sidewalks.I step from one

to the other, watching the proud headlights

and taillights passing on the distant bridge

for the daily Boot Camp graduations, and lean my cheek

against a tabby house to touch the rough sides of love,

finding comfort in its lastingness.

Eight miles away,

prepared for battle, my broken brother, ready to die

with all his will, but not to kill, shoelaceless, marches

his shaven head and beltless green fatigues into insanity.

Our preacher father blames himself for coupling

God’s word to his own commands of“Obey!”

delivered at the end of a belt, and wonders

if his son is weak,

and the song we learned in Sunday school

Jesus loves the little children,

runs in my head,

all the children of the world

or is he strong?

red and yellow, black and white

And the preacher is down on his knees

they are precious in His sight,

on a sandy beach near Parris Island

Jesus loves

weeping, praying for words, his palms clutching

the little children

each other, begging the unanswerable God,

of the world.

“What do I say to my son, now?”

The wait time to see my brother is long, and the visits

short: ten minutes.He is brought, marching,

from his cell to the Visitor’s Room.He does not

embrace me when he sees me.He doesn’t see me.

He is marching.In circles.Punching the air with one arm,

shouting the Marine Corps chant, holding up his pants

with the other. But sometimes he stops,

falls in my arms, but not for long,

and I croon to him in tongues, this split son

of our world’s creation, stroke the stubble

on the face he buries in my lap, and then he’s up

and marching again.

At dusk I drive back

to Beaufort where the windows of the houses

curving around the gulf glow like a necklace

on Judith’s throat.Oh, dear Father, judge not,

judge not. This is all we have for answers:

Your son can’t hear us. His voice is almost gone.

Yet, still he raves his manhood into padded walls,

marching our questions onward off to war,

around and around Cell Block 4, rasping

Oh yeah, Oh yeah, ready to fight, ready to die,

ready to kill with all my will, Oh yeah. . . .

the tears he doesn’t cry running

these five days along my cheeks.

Eyes, open like the dead, rise out of the AP photo

from the faces of five- and six-year-olds

cowering in a freshly dug ditch, and stare down

the green pastures of Sunday readers

settled in with their second cup, seeking

averted hearts for a resting place;

for the record, the ditch is as good as

nursery school: for milk and cookies they have

the unquestionable security of an M16

cradled in the arms of an American soldier who is,

according to the picture’s caption, “protecting

children from enemy sniper bullets,”

while the sounds of machine gun fire

stand their childhood up against the wall

of grown-ups, perforating it into good copy,

paper children captured in newsprint to be recycled

Sunday night, nothing more than a chunk of headline,

the corner of an ad where flesh and face might be,

or ripped off along the perforations,

clipped and filed away like payment stubs,

like a debt paid, like

like little well-wrought conceits,

exploited as balm for the conscience

of journalist and poet.

To all appearances they are having dinner,

the two women sitting halfway back

along the left wall of the Caffe Grazie.

They’ve come from the Met museum where

they wandered side by side, as they used to years ago,

talking diagonals, frontal planes, brushwork.

A sudden downpour has driven them here.

Now they are face-to-face. They raise their glasses,

laugh nervously, clink, sip, dip bread in olive oil,

focus on the menu, talk lobster and coriander reduction,

the earthiness of cauliflower custard. Light

from votive candles wavers over them.

The past is not mentioned. It has been declared

off limits. It is not clear by which one,

but it sits between them, a black hole, its

gravitational field waiting to suck them in.

But it won’t. They are here “getting on with their lives,”

“without the baggage of the past,” without amends,

talking salade composé, talking pumpkin polenta, talking

potato gnocchi. Rain blinds the Caffe’s street front window,

like tears behind contact lenses. These two are not

having dinner. They are reaching their arms

out across the unbridgeable abyss,

dancing from foot to foot on its rim, crying

“Mamma! Mamma!”

“My daughter! My daughter!”

talking granité aux fraises, talking espresso.

Or maybe only one of them is calling.

They wait, five women in black,

before a wall painted such a flat, soft gray

it reads as silence, or sky.

The pianist’s hands curve over the keyboard.

The page turner leans toward the pianist’s score.

The violinist, the violist, the cellist

bring their bows near the strings.Fluted pilasters

rise into an arch, ceiling high, framing them.

The church, classic Greek Revival

straight from the style books, and retardataire at that,

is fifty-seven years younger than the music that is about

to be played, but with its pillars, its two

center aisles dividing the nave into three parts,

in its classicism and its purity, it is useful

for showing the architecture of this sonata.

The thing about music, it takes place in time,

and can’t be seen. Nor can it be reproduced in a poem.

A colorless, unfinished, eight o’clock sky pauses

in triple hung windows flanking the pilasters.

Scrub oak darken the lower panes.

The pianist nods.

We know from the musicians’ movements

that Mozart’s allegro begins its lift

off the pages on the music stands, but here

there are only words, as black and white

as a picture show before the arrival of sound.

The pianist misses some notes.

The violist looks at the violinist,

her hair a stubble three months after chemo.

Strings shine on the black necks of the instruments.

The musicians’ fingers climb up and down like spiders,

thumbs hugging the backsides of the necks.

They glide their bows, or make them tiptoe,

forearms rigid, across the strings.

The second theme’s leading motif, almost lost

under the angelic, repeats and repeats

like supplications. It is one of Mozart’s miracles,

this longing under joy, the flirtations with death

balancing lyricism. The ensemble coaxes the allegretto

and transubstantiation from wooden boxes. In a year

the violist will be dead,

but for now she plays Mozart. The music breathes

in the musicians’ bodies. You can see it

in their shoulders, their spines, their wrists, their fingers,

and the white grid of the windows’ muntins cages the black sky.

Even where the bottom sashes open to the summer air,

the night is held back until the musicians stop,

hold their poses, wait, five seconds, twelve,

for the last notes to find home, and fling up their arms

pumped with arrival. They rise, bowing

before the firmament of the soft gray wall.

The lights come up in a country church.

Tonight they were bringing my brother up from the deep,

nothing so grand as the sea, merely

a quarry in Georgia, barely

a mile or two wide and flooded

to a depth of 200 feet, no bigger

in the scheme of things

than a soup spoon’s bowl,

but it held him, it cradled him,

this place vast as death,

small as life. It reduced him

to a speck in the universe.

The size of him, after all,

was vast and small.

It filled the spoon; it disappeared.