Book
VI
Cudjo breathed on the silver urn
And rubbed till his hand began to burn,
With his hoarded scrap of chamois-skin.
The metal glittered like bright new tin
And yet, as he labored, his mouth was sad—
“Times is gettin’ almighty bad.
Christmas a-comin’, sure and swif’,
But no use hollerin’ ‘Christmas Gif!’
No use keepin’ the silver fittin’,
No use doin’ nothin’ but sittin’.
Old Marse Billy stayin’ away,
Yankees shootin’ at Young Marse Clay,
Grey hairs in Miss Mary’s brush,
And a-whooin’ wind in de berry-bush,
Dat young red setter done eat her pups,
We was washin’ de tea set an’ bust two cups,
Just come apart in Liza’s han’—
Christmas, where has you gwine to, man?
Won’t you never come back again?
I feels like a cat in de outdoors rain.”
Christmas used to come without fail,
A big old man with a raccoan tail,
So fine and bushy it brushed the ground
And made folks sneeze when he waltzed around.
He was rolling river and lucky sun
And a laugh like a double-barrelled gun,
And the chip-straw hat on his round, bald head
Was full of money and gingerbread.
“Come in, Christmas, and have a cheer!
But, if he’s comin’, he won’t stop here,
He likes folks cheerful and dinners smokin’
And famblies shootin’ off caps and jokin’,
But he won’t find nothin’ on dis plantation,
But a lot of grievin’ conversation.
Dey’s tooken de carpets and window-weights
To go and shoot at de Yankee States,
Dey’s tooken Nelly, de cross-eye mule,
And whoever took her was one big fool;
Dey’s tooken dis an’ dey’s tooken dat,
Till I kain’t make out what dey’s drivin’ at.
But if Ole Marse Billy could see dis place
He’d cuss all Georgia blue in de face.
To see me wuhkin with dis ole shammy
Like a field-hand-nigger fum Alabammy,
And Ole Miss wearin’ a cornhusk hat,
Dippin’ ole close in de dyein’ vat,
Scrapin’ her petticoats up for lint
An’ bilin’ her tea out of julep-mint.
Young Marse Clay he’d feel mighty sad
If he’d seed de weddin’ his sisters had.
De grooms was tall and de brides was fine,
But dey drunk de health in blackberry wine,
And supper was thu at half-past-nine.
Weddin’s ust to last for a week,
But now we’s rowin’ up Hard Times Creek.
Somethin’s conjured dis white-folks’ South,
Somethin’ big with a hongry mouth,
Eatin’ an’ eatin’—I done my bes’,
Scattered de fedders and burnt de nes’,
Filled de bottle an’ made de hand
An’ buried de trick in Baptis’ land,
An’ dat trick’s so strong, I was skeered all night,
But, somehow or udder, it don’ wuhk right.
Ef I got me a piece of squinch-owl’s tail
An’ some dead-folks’ yearth fum de county jail,
It mout wuhk better—but I ain’t sho’,
And de wind keeps scrabblin’ under de do’,
Scratchin’ and scratchin’ his buzzard-claws,
Won’t nuthin’ feed you, hungry jaws?
Field hands keeps on hoein’ de corn,
Stupidest niggers ever born,
All dey’s good for is gravy-lickin’,
Ram-buttin’ and cotton-pickin’;
Dey don’t hear de wind in de slew,
But dat wind’s blowin’ over ’em too,
An’ dat wind’s res’less an’ dat wind’s wile,
An’ dat wind aches like a motherless chile,
Won’t nuthin’ feed you, achin’ wind?”
The hand stopped rubbing. The spoons were shined.
He put them back in the flannel bag
And stared at his scrap of chamois-rag.
War was a throat that swallowed things
And you couldn’t cure it with conjurings.
Sally Dupré watched over her dyeing-pots,
Evening was setting in with a light slow rain
That marched like a fairy army—there being nothing
From the white fog on the hill to the soaked door-stone
But a moving grey and silver hurry of lances,
Distinct yet crowded, thin as the edge of the moon,
Carried in no fleshed hand.
She thought to herself,
“I have stained my arms with new colors, doing this work,
The red is pokeberry-juice, the grey is green myrtle,
The deep black is queen’s delight.
If he saw me now
With my hands so parti-colored he would not know them.
He likes girls’ hands that nothing has stained but lotions,
This is too fast a dye.
I will dye my heart
In a pot of queen’s delight, in the pokeberry sap,
I will dye it red and black in the fool’s old colors
And send it to him, wrapped in a calico rag,
To keep him warm through the rain.
It will keep him warm.
And women in love do better without a heart.
What fools we are to wait the wheel of the year,
The year will not help our trouble.
What fools we are
To give our parti-colored hearts to the rain.
I am tired of the slogans now and tired of the saving,
I want to dance all night in a brand-new dress
And forget about wars and love and the South and courage.
The South is an old high house full of charming ladies,
The war is a righteous war full of gallant actions,
And love is a white camellia worn in the hair.
But I am tired of talking to charming ladies
And the smell of the white camellia, I will dye
My hands twice as black as ink in the working waters
And wait like a fool for bitter love to come home.
He was wounded this year. They hurt him. They hurt you, darling.
I have no doubt she came with a bunch of flowers
And talked to your wound and you like a charming lady.
I have no doubt that she came.
Her heart is not parti-colored. She’ll not go steeping
Her gentle hands in the pulp and the dead black waters
Till the crooked blot lies there like a devil’s shadow,
And the heart is stained with the stain.
If I came to the bed where you lay sick and in fever,
I would not come with little tight-fisted flowers
But with the white heron’s plume that lay in the forest
Till it was cooler than sleep.
The living balm would touch on your wound less gently,
The Georgia sun less fierce than my arms to hold you,
The steel bow less stubborn than my curved body
Strung against august death.
They hurt you, darling, they hurt you and I not with you,
I nowhere there to slit the cloth from your burning,
To find the head of the man who fired the bullet
And give his eyes to the crows.
House, house, house, it is not that my friend was wounded,
But that you kept him from me while he had freedom,
You and the girl whose heart is a snuffed white candle—
Now I will curse you both.
Comely house, high-courteous house of the gentle,
You must win your war for my friend is mixed in your quarrel,
But then you must fall, you must fall, for your walls divide us,
Your worn stones keep us apart.
I am sick of the bland camellias in your old gardens,
Your pride and passion are not my pride and my passion,
I am strangling to death in your cables of honeysuckle,
Your delicate lady-words.
I would rather dig in the earth than learn your patience,
I have need of a sky that never was cut for dresses
And a rough ground to tear my hands on like lion’s clothing,
And a hard wheel to move.
The low roof by the marches of rainy weather,
The sharp love that carries the fool’s old colors,
The bare bed that is not a saint’s or a lady’s,
The strong death at the end.
They hurt you, darling, they hurt you, and I not with you,
I nowhere by to see you, to touch my darling,
To take your fever upon me if I could take it
And burn my hands at your wound.
If I had been there—oh, how surely I would have found you,
How surely killed your foe—and sat by your bedside
All night long, like a mouse, like a stone unstirring,
Only to hear your slow breath moving the darkness,
Only to hear, more precious than childish beauty,
The slow tired beat of your heart.”
Wingate sat by a smoky fire
Mending a stirrup with rusty wire.
His brows were clenched in the workman’s frown,
In a day or a week they’d be back in town,
He thought of it with a brittle smile
That mocked at guile for its lack of guile
And mocked at ease for its lack of ease.
It was better riding through rainy trees
And playing tag with the Union spies
Than telling ladies the pleasant lies,
And yet, what else could you do, on leave?
He touched a rent in his dirty sleeve,
That was the place that the bullet tore
From the blue-chinned picket whose belt he wore,
The man who hadn’t been quick enough,
And the powder-burn on the other cuff
Belonged to the fight with the Yankee scout
Who died in Irish when he went out.
He thought of these things as a man might think
Of certain trees by a river-brink,
Seen in a flash from a passing train,
And, before you could look at them, gone again.
It was more important to eat and drink
Than give the pain or suffer the pain
And life was too rapid for memory.
“There are certain things that will cling to me,
But not the things that I thought would cling,
And the wound in my body cannot sting
Like the tame black crow with the bandaged wing,
The nervous eye and the hungry craw
That picked at the dressing-station straw
Till I was afraid it would pick my eyes
And couldn’t lift hand to beat it off.
I can tell the ladies the usual lies
Of the wild night-duels when two scouts clash
And your only light is his pistol-flash;
But I remember a watering-trough
Lost in a little brushwood town
And the feel of Black Whistle slumping down
Under my knees in the yellow air,
Hit by a bullet from God knows where …
Not the long, mad ride round the Union lines
But the smell of the swamp at Seven Pines,
The smell of the swamp by Gaines’s Mill,
And Lee in the dusk before Malvern Hill,
Riding along with his shoulders straight
Like a sending out of the Scaean Gate,
The cold intaglio of war.
‘This is Virginia’s Iliad,’
But Troy was taken nevertheless—
I remember the eyes my father had
When we saw our dead in the Wilderness—
I cannot remember any more—
Lucy will wear her English gown
When the Black Horse Troop comes back to town,
Pin her dress with a silver star
And tell our shadows how brave we are.
Lucy I like your white-and-gold—”
He blew on his hands for the day was cold,
And the damp, green wood gave little heat:
There was something in him that matched the sleet
And washed its hands in a rainy dream,
Till the stirrup-strap and the horses’ steam
And Shepley and Bristol behind his back,
Playing piquet with a dog-eared pack
And the hiss of the sap in the smoky wood
Mixed for a moment in something good,
Something outside of peace or war
Or a fair girl wearing a silver star,
Something hardly as vain as pride
And gaunt as the men he rode beside.
It made no comments but it was there,
Real as the color of Lucy’s hair
Or the taste of Henry Weatherby’s wine.
He thought “These people are friends of mine.
And we certainly fooled the Yanks last week,
When we caught those wagons at Boiling Creek,
I guess we’re not such a bad patrol
If we never get straight with the muster-roll,
I guess, next Spring, we can do it again—”
Bristol threw down a flyspecked ten,
“Theah,” he said, in the soft, sweet drawl
That could turn as hard as a Minie-ball,
“This heah day is my lucky day,
And Shepley nevah could play piquet.”
He stretched his arms in a giant yawn,
“Gentlemen, when are we movin’ on?
I have no desire for a soldier’s end,
While I still have winnin’s that I can spend
And they’s certain appointments with certain ladies
Which I’d miss right smart if I went to Hades,
Especially one little black-eyed charmer
Whose virtue, one hopes, is her only armor.
So if Sergeant Wingate’s mended his saddle
I suggest that we all of us now skedaddle,
To employ a term that the Yankees favor—”
He tasted his words, for he liked the flavor.
“And yet, one dreads to be back,” said he,
“One knows how tippled one well may be
If one meets with the oppor-tun-ity.
And even the charmers can likewise raise
Unpleasant doubts that may last for days—
And as one,” he sighed, “of our martial lads,
I’d rather be chargin’ Columbiads,
Than actin’ sweet to some old smooth-bore
When he tells me how he could win the War
By burnin’ the next Yank crossroads-store.
The Yanks aren’t always too blame polite,
But they fight like sin when they’ve got to fight,
And after they’ve almost nailed your hide
To your stinkin’ saddle in some ole ride,
It makes you mad when some nice home-guard
Tells you they nevah could combat hard.
I have no desire to complain or trouble
But I’d find this conflict as comfortable
As a big green pond for a duck to swim in,
If it wasn’t for leave, and the lovin’ women.”
The snow lay hard on the hills. You could burn your eyes
By too-long-looking into the cold ice-lens
Of infinite, pure, glittering, winter air.
It was as cold as that, as sparkling as that,
Where the crystal trees stood up like strange, brittle toys
After the sleet storm passed, till the setting sun
Hung the glass boughs with rainbows frozen to gems
And the long blue shadows pooled in the still hill-hollows.
The white and the purple lilacs of New England
Are frozen long, they will not bloom till the rains,
But when you look from the window, you see them there,
A great field of white lilacs.
A gathered sheaf
Of palest blossoms of lilac, stained with the purple evening.
Jack Ellyat turned away from the window now,
The frosty sleighbell of winter was in his ears,
He saw the new year, a child in a buffalo-robe,
Dragged in a sleigh whose runners were polished steel
Up the long hill of February, into chill light.
The child slept in the robe like a reindeer-colt,
Nuzzled under the winter. The bright bells rang.
He warmed his hands at the stove and shivered a little
Hearing that ice-sweet chime.
He was better now,
But his blood felt thin when he thought of skating along
Over black agate floors in the bonfire light
Or beating a girl’s red mittens free of the snow,
And he slept badly at times, when his flesh recalled
Certain smells and sights that were prison.
He stared at the clock where Phaëton’s horses lunged
With a queer nod of recognition. The rest had altered,
People and winter and nightmares and Ellen Baker,
Or stayed in a good dimension that he had lost,
But Phaëton was the same. He said to himself,
“I have met you twice, old, drunken charioteer,
Once in the woods, and once in a dirty shack
Where Death was a coin of spittle left on the floor.
I suppose we will meet again before there’s an end,
Well, let it happen.
It must have been cold last year
At Fredericksburg. I’m glad I wasn’t in that.
Melora, what’s happened to you?”
He saw Melora
Walking down from the woods in the low spring light.
His body hurt for a minute, but then it stopped.
He was getting well. He’d have to go back pretty soon.
He grinned, a little dryly, thinking of chance,
Father had seen the congressman after all,
Just before Shiloh. So now, nearly ten months later,
The curious wheels that are moved by such congressmen
Were sending him back to the Army of the Potomac,
Back with the old company, back with the Eastern voices,
Henry Fairfield limping along with his sticks,
Shot through both hips at Antietam.
He didn’t care,
Except for losing Bailey, which made it tough.
He tried to puzzle out the change in his world
But gave it up. Things and people looked just the same,
You could love or like or detest them just the same way,
But whenever you tried to talk of your new dimension
It didn’t sound right, except to creatures like Bailey.
“I have met you twice, old, drunken charioteer,
The third time you may teach me how to be cool.”
Ned, asleep by the stove, woke up and yawned,
“Hello Ned,” said his master, with a half-smile,
“I told a girl about you, back in a wood,
You’d like that girl. She’d rub the back of your ears.
And Bailey’d like you too. I wish Bailey was here.
Want to go to war, Ned?” Ned yawned largely again.
Ellyat laughed. “You’re right, old fella,” he said,
“You get too mixed up in a war. You better stay here.
God, I’d like to sleep by a stove for a million years,
Turn into a dog and remember how to stand cold.”
The clock struck five. Jack Ellyat jumped at the sound
Then he sank back. “No, fooled you that time,” he said,
As if the strokes had been bullets.
Then he turned
To see his mother, coming in with a lamp,
And taste the strange tastes of supper and quietness.
John Vilas heard the beating of another
Sleet at another and a rougher wall
While his hands knotted together and then unknotted.
Each time she had to moan, his hands shut down,
And now the moans were coming close together,
Close as bright streaks of hail.
The younger children
Slept the uneasy sleep of innocent dogs
Who know there’s something strange about the house,
Stranger than storms, and yet they have to sleep,
And someone has to watch them sleeping now.
“Harriet’s right and Harriet’s upstairs,
And Harriet cried like this when she gave birth,
Eighteen years back, in that chintz-curtained room,
And her long cry ran like an icicle
Into my veins. I can remember yet
The terrible old woman with the shawl
Who sat beside me, like deserted Fate,
Cursing me with those eyes each time she cried,
Although she must, one time, have cried like that
And been the object of as wild a cry,
And so far back—and on—and always that,
The linked, the agonizing chain of cries
Brighter than steel, because earth will be earth
And the sun strike it, and the seed have force.
And yet no cry has touched me like this cry.
Harriet’s right and Harriet’s upstairs
And Harriet would have kept her from today,
And now today has come, I look at it,
Under the icicle, and wish it gone,
Because it hurts me to be sitting here,
Biting my fingers at my daughter’s cry
And knowing Harriet has the harder task
As she has had for nearly twenty years.
And yet, what I have sought that I have sought
And cannot disavouch for my own pang,
Or be another father to the girl
Than he who let her run the woods alone
Looking for stones that have no business there.
For Harriet sees a dozen kinds of pain.
And some are blessed, being legitimate,
And some are cursed, being outside a law:
But she and I see only pain itself
And are hard-hearted with our epitaphs,
And yet I wish I could not hear that cry.
I know that it will pass because all things
Pass but the search that only ends with breath,
And, even after that, my daughter and I
May still get up from bondage, being such
Smoke as no chain of steel-bright cries can chain,
To walk like Indian Summer through the woods
And be the solitaries of the wind
Till we are sleepy as old clouds at last.
She has a lover and will have a child
And I’m alone. I had forgotten that,
Though you’d not think it easy to forget.
No, we’ll not go together.
The cries beat
Like hail upon the cold panes of my heart
Faster and faster, till they crack the glass
And I can know at last how old I am.
That is my punishment and my defence,
My ecstasy and my deep-seated bane.
I prayed to life for life once, in my youth,
Between the rain and a long stroke of cloud
Till my soaked limbs felt common with the sky
And the black stone of heaven swung aside,
With a last clap of water, to reveal
Lonely and timid, after all that wrath,
The small, cold, perfect flower of the new moon
And now, perhaps, I’ll pray again tonight,
Still to the life that used me as a man
Uses and wears a strong and riotous horse,
Still to the vagrants of no fortunate word.
Men who go looking for the wilderness-stone,
Eaters of life who run away from bread
And are not satisfied with lucky days!
Robbers of airy gold, skin-changing men
Who find odd brothers when the moon is full,
Stray alchemics who entertain an imp
And feed it plums within a hollow tree
Until its little belly is sufficed,
Men who have seen the bronze male-partridge beat
His drum of feathers not ten feet away,
Men who have listened to wild geese at night
Until your hearts were hollowed with that sound,
Moth-light and owl-light and first-dayspring men,
Seekers and seldom-finders of the woods,
But always seekers till your eyes are shut;
I have an elder daughter that I love
And, having loved from childhood, would not tame
Because I once was tamed.
If you’re my friends,
Then she’s your friend.
I do not ask for her
Refusal or compunction or the safe
Road between little houses and old gates
Where Death lies sleepy as a dog in the sun
And the slow cows come home with evening bells
Into the tired peace that’s good for pain.
Those who are never tired of eating life
Must immolate themselves against a star
Sooner or late, as she turns crucified
Now, on that flagellating wheel of light
Which will not miss one revolution’s turn
For any anguish we can bring to it,
Because it is our master and our stone,
Body of pain, body of sharpened fire,
Body of quenchless life, itself, itself,
That safety cannot buy or peddlers sell
Or the rich cowards leave their silly sons.
But, oh,
She’s tired out, she’s broken, she’s athirst.
Wrap her in twilights now, she is so torn,
And mask again the cold, sweat-runnelled mask
With the deep silence of a leafy wood
So cool and dim its birds are all asleep
And will not fret her. Wipe her straining hands
With the soft, gleaming cobwebs April spins
Out of bright silver tears and spider silk
Till they are finer than the handkerchiefs
Of a young, wild, spear-bearing fairy-queen.
Soothe her and comfort her and let her hear
No harshness but the mumbling peaceful sound
The fed bee grumbles to his honey-bags
In the red foxglove’s throat.
Oh, if you are
Anything but lost shadows, go to her!”
Melora did not make such words for herself,
Being unable, and too much in pain.
If wood-things were beside her, she did not see them,
But only a lamp, and hands.
The pains came hard now,
A fist that hardly opened before it shut,
A red stair mounting into an ultimate
Flurry of misty conflict, when it seemed
As if she fought against the earth itself
For mere breath and something other than mere breath.
She heard the roar of the tunnel, drowned in earth.
Earth and its expulsive waters, tearing her, being born.
Then it was yellow silence and a weak crying.
After the child was washed, they showed her the child,
Breakable, crumpled, breathing, swathed and indignant,
With all its nails and hands that moved of themselves—
A queer thing to come out of that, but then it was there.
“Looks healthy enough,” said her mother in a tired voice.
Melora stared. “He’s got blue eyes,” she said finally.
Her mother sniffed. “A lot of ’em start out blue.”
She looked at the child as if she wanted to tell it,
“You aren’t respectable. What are you doing here?”
But the child began wailing. She rocked it mechanically.
The rain kept on through the night but nobody listened.
The parents talked for a while, then they fell asleep.
Even the new child slept with its fists tight shut.
Melora heard the rain for a single moment
And then deep, beautiful nothing. “Over,” she thought.
She slept, handfasted to the wilderness-stone.
Now the earth begins to roll its wheel toward the sun,
The deep mud-gullies are drying.
The sluggish armies
That have slept the bear-months through in their winter-camps,
Begin to stir and be restless.
They’re tired enough
Of leaky huts and the rain and punishment-drill.
They haven’t forgotten what it was like last time,
But next time we’ll lick ’em, next time it won’t be so bad,
Somehow we won’t get killed, we won’t march so hard.
“These huts looked pretty good when we first hit camp
But they look sort of lousy now—we might as well git—
Fight the Rebs—and the Yanks—and finish it up.”
So they think in the bored, skin-itching months
While the roads are drying. “We’re sick of this crummy place,
We might as well git, it doesn’t much matter where.”
But when they git, they are cross at leaving the huts,
“We fixed up ours first rate. We had regular lamps.
We knew the girls at the Depot. It wasn’t so bad.
Why the hell do we have to git when we just got fixed?
Oh, well, we might as well travel.”
So they go on,
The huts drop behind, the dry road opens ahead. …
Fighting Joe Hooker feels good when he looks at his men.
A blue-eyed, uncomplex man with a gift for phrase.
“The finest army on the planet,” he says.
The phrase is to turn against him with other phrases
When he is beaten—but now he is confident.
Tall, sandy, active, sentimental and tart,
His horseman’s shoulder is not yet bowed by the weight
Of knowing the dice are his and the cast of them,
The weight of command, the weight of Lee’s ghostly name.
He rides, preparing his fate.
In the other camps,
Lee writes letters, is glad to get buttermilk,
Wrings food and shoes and clothes from his commissariat,
Trusts in God and whets a knife on a stone.
Jackson plays with his new-born daughter, waiting for Spring,
His rare laugh clangs as he talks to his wife and child.
He is looking well. War always agrees with him,
And this, perhaps, is the happiest time of his life.
He has three months of it left.
By the swollen flood
Of the Mississippi, stumpy Grant is a mole
Gnawing at Vicksburg. He has been blocked four times
But he will carry that beaver-dam at last.
There is no brilliant lamp in that dogged mind
And no conceit of brilliance to shake the hand,
But hand and mind can use the tools that they get.
This long way out of Galena.
Sherman is there
And Sherman loves him and finds him hard to make out,
In Sherman’s impatient fashion—the quick, sharp man
Seeing ten thousand things where the slow sees one
And yet with a sort of younger brother awe
At the infinite persistence of that slow will
—They make a good pair of hunting dogs, Grant and Sherman,
The nervous, explosive, passionate, slashing hound
And the quiet, equable, deadly holder-on,
Faded-brown as a cinnamon-bear in Spring—
See them like that, the brown dog and the white dog,
Calling them back and forth through the scrubby woods
After the little white scut of Victory,
Or see them as elder brother and younger brother,
But remember this. In their time they were famous men
And yet they were not jealous, one of the other.
When the gold has peeled from the man on the gilded horse,
Riding Fifth Avenue, and the palm-girl’s blind;
When the big round tomb gapes empty under the sky,
Vacant with summer air, when it’s all forgotten,
When nobody reads the books, when the flags are moth-dust,
Write up that. You won’t have to write it so often.
It will do as well as the railway-station tombs.
So with the troops and the leaders of the bear-armies,
The front-page-newspaper-things.
Tall Lincoln reviews
Endless columns crunching across new snow.
They pass uncheering at the marching-salute.
Lincoln sits on his horse with his farmer’s seat,
Watching the eyes go by and the eyes come on.
The gaunt, long body is dressed in its Sunday black,
The gaunt face, strange as an omen, sad and foreboding.
The eyes look at him, he looks back at the eyes;
They pass and pass. They go back to their camps at last.
“So that was him,” they say. “So that’s the old man.
I’m glad we saw him. He isn’t so much on looks
But he looks like people you know. He looks sad all right,
I never saw nobody look quite as sad as that
Without it made you feel foolish. He don’t do that.
He makes you feel—I dunno—I’m glad we could see him.
He was glad to see us but you could tell all the same
This war’s plumb killin’ him. You can tell by his face.
I never saw such a look on any man’s face.
I guess it’s tough for him. Well, we saw him, for once.”
That day in Richmond, a mob of angry women
Swarm in the streets and riot for bread or peace.
They loot some shops, a few for the bread they need,
A few for thieving, most because they are moved
By discontent and hunger to do as the rest.
The troops are called out. The troops are about to fire,
But Davis gets on a wagon and calms the crowd
Before the tumbled bodies clutter the street.
He never did a better thing with his voice
And it should be told. Next day they riot again,
But this time the fire is weaker. They are dispersed,
A few arrested. Bread grows dearer than ever.
The housewives still go out with their market-baskets,
But coffee’s four dollars a pound and tea eleven.
They come back with a scraping of this and a scrap of that
And try to remember old lazy, lagniappe days,
The slew-foot negro chanting his devilled crabs
Along the street, and the market-women piling
The wicker baskets with everything good and fresh;
Topping it off with a great green fist of parsley
That you used to pretty the sides of the serving-dish
And never bothered to eat.
They improvise dishes,
“Blockade pudding” … “Confederate fricassee,”
Serve hominy grits on the Royal Derby china
And laugh or weep in their cups of willow-bark tea.
Davis goes back from the riot, his shoulders stooped,
The glow of speech has left him and he feels cold.
He eats a scant meal quickly and turns to the endless
Papers piled on his desk, the squabbles and plans,
A haggard dictator, fretting the men he rules
And being fretted by them.
He dreams, perhaps,
Of old days, riding wild horses beside his wife
Back in his youth, on a Mississippi road.
That was a good time. It is past. He drowns in his papers.
The curtain is going up on that battlesmoked,
Crowded third act which is to decide this war
And yet not end it for years.
Turn your eyes away
From these chiefs and captains, put them back in their books.
Let the armies sleep like bears in a hollow cave.
War is an iron screen in front of a time,
With pictures smoked upon it in red and black,
Some gallant enough, some deadly, but all intense.
We look at the pictures, thinking we know the time,
We only know the screen.
Look behind it now
At the great parti-colored quilt of these patchwork States.
This part and that is vexed by a battle-worm,
But the ploughs go ahead, the factory chimneys smoke,
A new age curdles and boils in a hot steel cauldron
And pours into rails and wheels and fingers of steel,
Steel is being born like a white-hot rose
In the dark smoke-cradle of Pittsburg—
a man with a crude
Eye of metal and crystal looks at a smear
On a thin glass plate and wonders—
a shawled old woman
Sits on a curbstone calling the evening news.
War, to her, is a good day when papers sell
Or a bad day when papers don’t. War is fat black type.
Anything’s realer than war.
By Omaha
The valleys and gorges are white with the covered wagons
Moving out toward the West and the new, free land.
All through the war they go on.
Five thousand teams
Pass Laramie in a month in the last war-year,
Draft-evaders, homesteaders, pioneers,
Old soldiers, Southern emigrants, sunburnt children. …
Men are founding colleges, finding gold,
Selling bad beef to the army and making fortunes,
Ploughing the stone-cropped field that their fathers ploughed.
(Anything’s realer than war.)
A moth of a woman,
Shut in a garden, lives on scraps of Eternity
With a dog, a procession of sunsets and certain poems
She scribbles on bits of paper. Such poems may be
Ice-crystals, rubies cracked with refracted light,
Or all vast death like a wide field in ten short lines.
She writes to the tough, swart-minded Higginson
Minding his negro troops in a lost bayou,
“War feels to me like an oblique place.”
A man
Dreams of a sky machine that will match the birds
And another, dusting the shelves of a country store,
Saves his pennies until they turn into dimes.
(Anything’s realer than war.)
A dozen men
Charter a railroad to go all across the Plains
And link two seas with a whistling iron horse.
A whiskered doctor stubbornly tries to find
The causes of childbed-fever—and, doing so,
Will save more lives than all these war-months have spent,
And never inhabit a railway-station tomb.
All this through the war, all this behind the flat screen. …
I heard the song of breath
Go up from city and country,
The even breath of the sleeper,
The tired breath of the sick,
The dry cough in the throat
Of the man with the death-sweat on him,
And the quiet monotone
We breathe but do not hear.
The harsh gasp of the runner,
The long sigh of power
Heaving the weight aloft,
The grey breath of the old.
Men at the end of strength
With their lungs turned lead and fire,
Panting like thirsty dogs;
A child’s breath, blowing a flame.
The breath that is the voice,
The silver, the woodwinds speaking,
The dear voice of your lover,
The hard voice of your foe,
And the vast breath of wind,
Mysterious over mountains,
Caught in pines like a bird
Or filling all hammered heaven.
I heard the song of breath,
Like a great strand of music,
Blown between void and void,
Uncorporal as the light.
The breath of nations asleep,
And the piled hills they sleep in,
The word that never was flesh
And yet is nothing but life.
What are you, bodiless sibyl,
Unseen except as the frost-cloud
Puffed from a silver mouth
When the hard winter’s cold?
We cannot live without breath,
And yet we breathe without knowledge,
And the vast strand of sound
Goes on, eternally sighing,
Without dimension or space,
Without beginning or end.
I heard the song of breath
And lost it in all sharp voices,
Even my own voice lost
Like a thread in that huge strand,
Lost like a skein of air,
And with it, continents lost
In the great throat of Death.
I trembled, asking in vain,
Whence come you, whither art gone?
The continents flow and melt
Like wax in the naked candle,
Burnt by the wick of time—
Where is the breath of the Chaldees,
The dark, Minoan breath?
I said to myself in hate,
Hearing that mighty rushing,
Though you raise a new Adam up
And blow fresh fire in his visage,
He has only a loan of air,
And gets but a breathing-space.
But then I was quieted.
I heard the song of breath,
The gulf hollow with voices,
Fused into one slow voice
That never paused or was faint.
Man, breathing his life,
And with him all life breathing,
The young horse and the snake,
Beetle, lion and dove,
Solemn harps of the fir,
Trumpets of sea and whirlwind
And the vast, tiny grass
Blown by a breath and speaking.
I heard these things. I heard
The multitudinous river.
When I came back to my life,
My voice was numb in my ears,
I wondered that I still breathed.
Sophy, scared chambermaid in Pollet’s Hotel,
Turned the cornhusk mattress and plumped the pillow
With slipshod hands.
Then she picked the pillow up
And sniffed it greedily.
Something in it smelt sweet.
The bright, gold lady had slept there the night before—
Oh, her lovely, lovely clothes! and the little green bottle
That breathed out flowers when you crept into the room
And pulled out the silver stopper just far enough
To get the sweetness, not far enough to be caught
If anyone came.
It made her thin elbows ache
To think how fine and golden the lady was
And how sweet she smelled, how sweet she looked at the men,
How they looked at her.
“I’d like to smell sweet,” she thought,
“Smell like a lady.”
She put the hard pillow back.
The lady and the green bottle had gone away.
—If only you had clever hands—after the next sleeper—
—You could steal green bottles—the room would smell stale again—
Hide it somewhere under your dress—as it always did—
Stale cigars and tired bodies—or even say
When they reached to give you the tip, “Don’t give me a tip,
Just give me”—unwashed men with their six-weeks’ beards,
Trying to hold you back when—“that little green bottle,
I want it so.”—but the lady would never do it.
Ladies named Lucy. Lucy was a good name,
Flower-smelling. Sophy was just a name.
She took up her broom and swept ineffectively,
Thinking dim thoughts.
The ladies named Lucy came,
Sometimes, in the winter, and then all the men got shaved
And you could look through the door at the people dancing.
But when battles drew near, the ladies went home to stay.
It was right they should. War wasn’t a thing for ladies.
War was an endless procession of dirty boots.
Filling pitchers and emptying out the slops,
And making the cornhusk beds for the unshaved men
Who came in tired—but never too tired to wonder—
Look in the eyes—and hands—and suppose you didn’t,
They didn’t like it—and if you did, it was nothing—
But they always—and rough sometimes—and drunk now and then—
And a couple of nice ones—well, it didn’t mean nothing.
It was merely hard to carry the heavy pails
When you didn’t get fed enough and got up so soon.
But, now the army was moving, there wouldn’t be
So many men or beds or slops for a while
And that meant something.
She sighed and dabbed with her broom.
Shippy, the little man with the sharp rat-eyes,
Came behind her and put his hands on her waist.
She let him turn her around. He held her awhile
While his eyes tried to look at her and over his shoulder
At once and couldn’t.
She felt his poor body shake
But she didn’t think much about it.
He murmured something.
She shook her head with the air of a frightened doll
And he let her go.
“Well, I got to go anyway,”
He said, in a gloomy voice. “I’m late as it is,
But I thought that maybe—” He let the sentence trail off.
“What do you want, next time I come back?” he said.
Her face was sharper. “You bring me a bottle, Charley,
The kind that lady had, with the Richmond scent.
Hers has got a big silver stopper.”
He pursed his mouth.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll try. I’d like to all right.
You be a good girl now, Soph. Do you love me, Sophy?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, in a tired voice, thinking of pitchers.
“Well, I—you’re a good girl, Soph.” He held her again.
“I’m late,” he muttered. She looked at him and felt mean.
He was skimpy like her. They ought to be nice to each other.
She didn’t like him much but she sort of loved him.
“You be a good girl till Charley comes back,” he mumbled,
Kissing her nervously. “I’ll bring you the scent.”
“It’s got a name called French Lilies,” she said. “Oh, Charley!”
They clung together a moment like mournful shadows.
He was crying a little, the wet tears fell on her chin,
She cried herself when he’d gone, she didn’t know why,
But when she thought of the scent with the silver stopper
She felt more happy. She went to make the next bed.
Luke Breckenridge, washing his shirt in a muddy pool,
Chewed on a sour thought.
Only yesterday
He had seen the team creak by toward Pollet’s Hotel
With that damn little rat-eyed peddler driving his mules
As if he was God Almighty.
He conjured up
A shadow-Shippy before him to hate and bruise
As he beat his shirt with a stone.
“If we-uns was home,
I could just lay for him and shoot him out of the bresh,
Goin’ to see my girl with his lousy mules.
Tryin’ to steal my girl with his peddler’s talk!”
But here, in the war, you could only shoot at the Yanks,
If you shot other folks, they found out about it and shot you,
Just like you was a spyer or something mean
Instead of a soldier. There wasn’t no sense to it,
“Teach him to steal my girl—if I had him home,
Back in the mountains—I told her straight the last time,
You be a good girl, Soph, and I’ll buy you a dress—
We can fix the cabin up fine—and if we have kids
We’ll get ourselves married. Couldn’t talk fairer than that,
And she’s a good girl—but women’s easy to change—
God-damn peddler, givin’ her Richmond trash,
And we-uns movin’ away to scrimmage the Yanks
Before I git a chance to see her agin
And find out if she’s been good—He’ll come back this way,
Drivin’ his mules—plumb easy to lay for him,
But they’d catch me, shore.”
His mouth had a bitter twist,
His slow mind grubbed for a plan to settle his doubts.
At last he dropped his stone with a joyous whoop.
“Hey, Billy,” he called to his neighbor. “Got your shirt dry?
Well, lend it here for a piece until mine’s wrung out,
I got to go see the Captain.”
Billy demurred.
“I got friends enough in this shirt,” he said with a drawl.
“I ain’t hankerin’ after no visitors out of yours.
I’m a modest man and my crawlies is sort of shy,
They don’t mix well with strangers. They’s Piedmont crawlies.
Besides, this shirt, she’s still got more shirt than hole,
Yours ain’t a shirt—it’s a doughnut.”
They swore for a while
But finally Luke went off with the precious shirt,
Whistling the tuneless snatch of a mountain jig,
“Gawd help you, peddler,” he thought, as he looked for the Captain.
Shippy drove his rattletrap cart along
Through the dusty evening, worried and ill at ease.
He ought to have taken the other road by the creek
But he’d wasted too much time at Pollet’s Hotel
Looking for Sophy—and hardly seen her at that—
And now she wanted a bottle of scent.
His soul
Shivered with fear like a thin dog in the cold,
Raging in vain at the terrible thing called Life.
—There must be a corner somewhere where you could creep,
Curl up soft and be warm—but he’d never found it.
The big boys always stole his lunch at the school
And rubbed his nose in the dirt—and when he grew up
It was just the same.
There was something under his face,
Something that said, “Come, bully me—I won’t bite.”
He couldn’t see it himself, but it must be there.
He was always going places and thinking, “This time,
They won’t find out.” But they always did find out
After a while.
It had been that way at the store,
That way in the army, that way now as a spy.
Behind his eyes he built up a super-Shippy
Who ordered people around, loved glittering girls,
Threw out his chest and died for a bloody flag
And then revived to be thanked by gilt generals,
A schoolboy Shippy, eating the big boys’ lunch.
It was his totem. He visioned that Shippy now,
Reckless Shippy with papers sewed in his boots,
Slyly carrying fate through the Rebel lines
To some bright place where—
The off mule stumbled and brayed.
He cursed it whimperingly and jerked at the reins,
While his heart jerked, too. The super-Shippy was gone.
He was alone and scared and late on the road.
My God, but he was scared of being a spy
And the mute-faced woman in Richmond and war and life!
He had some papers sewn in his boots all right
And they’d look at the papers while he stood sweating before them,
Crumple them up and bully him with cross speech,
“Couldn’t you even find out where Heth’s men are?
Can’t you draw a map? You don’t know about Stonewall Jackson?
Why don’t you know it? What’s this ford by the church?
My God, man, what do you think you are out there for?
You’ll have to do better next time, I can tell you that.
We’ll send you over Route 7. We had a man there,
But he’s been reported killed—”
He shuddered in vain,
Seeing a rope and a tree and a dangling weight
And the mute-faced woman sending a paper off
In somebody’s else’s boots, and somebody saying
In an ice-cream voice to another scared little man.
“Next time, you’ll try Route 7. We had a man there,
But he’s been reported killed—”
Oh, there is a hole
Somewhere deep in the ground where the rabbits hide,
But I’ve never found it—
They stuck up signs and a flag
And it was war and you went and got scared to death
By the roar and the yells and the people trying to kill you
Till anything else seemed better—and there you were,
Driving mules with papers sewn in your boots,
But people still wanting to kill you—and no way out.
If you deserted, the mute-faced woman would know
And that would be the worst—and if you went back,
It would be Bull Run and yelling and all that blood
When it made you sick to your stomach. Even at school
You always had to fight. There was no way out.
Sophy was sweet and Sophy was a good girl
And Sophy was the warm earth where the rabbits hide
Away from danger, letting their hearts go slow,
But you couldn’t stay with Sophy, you couldn’t stay,
And she’d say she’d be a good girl—
but, in spite of himself,
He saw a big boy tearing a cardboard box
Apart, with greedy hands, in a bare school-yard,
Where a Shippy whimpered—
“Oh, Soph, I’ll get you the scent,
Honest I will! Oh God, just let me get through,
Just this one time—and I’ll pray—I’ll be good—oh God,
Make these papers something they want!”
He clucked to his mules.
Another mile and he’d be out on the pike
And pretty safe for a while.
His spirit returned
To building the super-Shippy from dust again.
His head began to nod with the sway of the cart. …
Half a dozen men rode out from a little clearing
And casually blocked the road. He pulled up his mules,
Staring around. He saw a face that he knew,
Now queer with triumph—Sophy filling a pail
And that gangling fellow lounging against the pump,
Hungry-eyed—
It happened too fast to be scary.
You got stopped such a lot. It was only some new patrol.
“All the boys know me,” he said. “Yes, I got my pass.”
They took the pass but they did not give it back.
There was a waver shaking the dusty air,
The feel of a cord grown tauter. How dry his throat was!
He’d be driving on in a minute. “Well boys?” he said,
“Well, fellers?”
They didn’t answer or look at him.
“I tell you that’s the man,” said the mountaineer.
The sergeant-feller looked dubiously at the rest,
Gentlemanly he looked like, a nice young feller
With his little black moustache and his thin, brown face,
He wouldn’t do anything mean. It would be all right.
Another man was paring his nails with a knife,
His face was merry and reckless—nice feller, too,
Feller to stand you a drink and talk gay with the girls,
Not anybody to hurt you or twist your wrist.
They were all nice fellers except for the mountaineer.
They were searching him now, but they didn’t do it mean.
He babbled to them all through it.
“Now boys, now boys,
You’re making a big mistake, boys. They all know me,
They all know Charley the peddler.”
The sergeant looked
Disgusted now—wonder why. Go ahead and look,
You’ll never find it—Sophy—bottle of scent—
A horrible voice was saying, “Pull off his boots,”
He fought like a frightened rat then, weeping and biting,
But they got him down and found the papers all right.
Luke Breckenridge observed them with startled eyes,
“Christ,” he thought, “so the skunk’s a spy after all.
Well, I told ’em so—but I didn’t reckon he was.
Little feist of a peddler, chasin’ my girl,
Wanted to scare him off so he wouldn’t come back—
Hell, they ought to make me a corporal now.”
He was pleased.
Clay Wingate looked at the writhing man,
“Get up!” he said, in a hard voice, feeling sick.
But they had to drag it up before it would stand
And even then it still babbled.
His throat was dry
But that was all right—it was going to be all right—
He was alive—he was Shippy—he knew a girl—
He was going to buy her a bottle of first-class scent.
It couldn’t all stop. He wasn’t ready to die.
He was willing enough to be friends and call it a joke.
Let them take the mules and the cart and hurt him a lot
Only not that—it was other spies who were hung,
Not himself, not Shippy, not the body he knew
With the live blood running through it, making it warm.
He was real. He wore clothes. He could make all this go away
If he shut his eyes. They’d turn him loose in a minute.
They were all nice fellers. They wouldn’t treat a man mean.
They couldn’t be going to hang him.
But they were.
Lucy Weatherby spread out gowns on a bed
And wondered which she could wear to the next levee.
The blue was faded, the rose brocade had a tear,
She’d worn the flowered satin a dozen times,
The apricot had never gone with her hair,
And somebody had to look nice at the evening parties.
But it was hard. The blockade runners of course—
But so few of them had space for gowns any more
And, really, they charged such prices!
Of course it is
The war, and, of course, when one thinks of our dear, brave boys—
But, nevertheless, they like a girl to look fresh
When they come back from their fighting.
When one goes up
To the winter-camps, it doesn’t matter so much,
Any old rag will do for that sort of thing.
But here, in Richmond …
She pondered, mentally stitching,
Cutting and shaping, lost in a pleasant dream.
Fighting at Chancellorsville and Hooker beaten
And nobody killed that you knew so terribly well
Except Jo Frear’s second brother—though it was sad
Our splendid general Jackson’s lost his arm,
Such an odd man but so religious.
She hummed a moment
“That’s Stonewall Jackson’s way” in her clear cool voice.
“I really should have trained for nursing,” she thought.
She heard a voice say, “Yes, the General’s very ill,
But that lovely new nurse will save him if anyone can.
She came out from Richmond on purpose.”
The voice stopped speaking.
She thought of last month and the boys and the Black Horse Troop,
And the haggard little room in Pollet’s Hotel
Whose slipshod chambermaid had such scared, round eyes.
She was just as glad they were fighting now, after all,
Huger had been so jealous and Clay so wild,
It was quite a strain to be engaged to them both
Especially when Jim Merrihew kept on writing
And that nice Alabama major—
She heard the bells
Ring for a wedding—but who was the man beside her?
He had a face made up of too many faces.
And yet, a young girl must marry—
You may dance,
Play in the sun and wear bright gowns to levees,
But soon or late, the hands unlike to your hands
But rough and seeking, will catch your lightness at last
And with strange passion force you. What is this passion,
This injury that women must bear for gowns?
It does not move me or stir me. I will not bear it.
There are women enough to bear it. If I have sweetness,
It is for another service. It is my own.
I will not share it. I’ll play in the heat of the sun.
And yet, young girls must marry—what am I thinking?
She stepped from her hoops to try on the rose brocade,
But let it lie for a moment, while she stood up
To look at the bright ghost-girl in the long dark mirror,
Adoringly.
“Oh, you honey,” she thought. “You honey!
You look so pretty—and nobody knows but me.
Nobody knows.”
She kissed her little white shoulders,
With fierce and pitying love for their shining whiteness,
So soft, so smooth, so untarnished, so honey-sweet.
Her eyes were veiled. She swayed in front of the mirror.
“Honey, I love you,” she whispered, “I love you, honey.
Nobody loves you like I do, do they, sugar?
Nobody knows but Lucy how sweet you are.
You mustn’t get married, honey. You mustn’t leave me.
We’ll be pretty and sweet to all of them, won’t we, honey?
We’ll always have beaus to dance with and tunes to dance to,
But you mustn’t leave me, honey. I couldn’t bear it.
You mustn’t ever leave me for any man.”
In the dense heart of the thicketed Wilderness,
Stonewall Jackson lies dying for four long days.
They have cut off his arm, they have tried such arts as they know,
But no arts now can save him.
When he was hit
By the blind chance bullet-spatter from his own lines,
In the night, in the darkness, they stole him off from the field
To keep the men from knowing, but the men knew.
The dogs in the house will know when there’s something wrong.
You do not have to tell them.
He marched his men
That grim first day across the whole Union front
To strike a sleepy right wing with a sudden stone
And roll it up—it was his old trick of war
That Lee and he could play like finger and thumb!
It was the last time they played so.
When the blue-coated
Unprepared ranks of Howard saw that storm,
Heralded by wild rabbits and frightened deer,
Burst on them yelling, out of the whispering woods,
They could not face it. Some men died where they stood,
The storm passed over the rest. It was Jackson’s storm,
It was his old trick of war, for the last time played.
He must have known it. He loosed it and drove it on,
Hearing the long yell shake like an Indian cry
Through the dense black oaks, the clumps of second-growth pine,
And the red flags reel ahead through the underbrush.
It was the hour he did not stop to taste,
Being himself. He saw it and found it good,
But night was falling, the Union centre still held,
Another attack would end it. He pressed ahead
Through the dusk, pushing Little Sorrel, as if the horse
Were iron, and he were iron, and all his men
Not men but iron, the stalks of an iron broom
Sweeping a dirt floor clean—and yet, as he rode,
A canny captain, planning a ruthless chess
Skilfully as night fell. The night fell too soon.
It is hard to tell your friend from your enemy
In such a night. So he rode too far in advance
And, turning back toward his lines, unrecognized,
Was fired upon in the night, in the stumbling darkness,
By his own men. He had ridden such rides before
Often enough and taken the chance of them,
But this chance was his bane.
He lay on the bed
After the arm had been lopped from him, grim and silent,
Refusing importunate Death with terrible eyes.
Death was a servant and Death was a sulky dog
And Death crouched down by the Lord in the Lord’s own time,
But he still had work to finish that Death would spoil.
He would live in spite of that servant.
Now and then
He spoke, with the old curt justice that never once
Denied himself or his foe or any other
The rigid due they deserved, as he saw that due.
He spoke of himself and his storm. “A successful movement.
I think the most successful I ever made.”
—He had heard that long yell shake like an Indian cry
Through the ragged woods and seen his flags go ahead.
Later on, they brought him a stately letter from Lee
That said in Lee’s gracious way, “You have only lost
Your left arm, I my right.”
The dour mouth opened.
“Better ten Jacksons should fall than one Lee,” it said
And closed again, while the heart went on with its task
Of beating off foolish, unnecessary Death.
The slow time wore. They had to tell him at last
That he must die. The doctors were brave enough,
No doubt, but they looked awhile at the man on the bed
And summoned his wife to do it. So she told him.
He would not believe at first. Then he lay awhile
Silent, while some slow, vast reversal of skies
Went on in the dying brain. At last he spoke.
“All right,” he said.
She opened the Bible and read.
It was Spring outside the window, the air was warm,
The rough, plank house was full enough of the Spring.
They had had a good life together, those two middle-aged
Calm people, one reading aloud now, the other silent.
They had passed hard schools. They were in love with each other
And had been for many years. Now that tale was told.
They had been poor and odd, found each other trusty,
Begotten children, prayed, disliked to be parted,
Had family-jokes, known weather and other matters,
Planned for an age: they were famous now, he was dying.
The clock moved on, the delirium began.
The watchers listened, trying to catch the words;
Some awed, one broken-hearted, a few, no doubt,
Not glad to be there precisely, but in a way
Glad that, if it must happen, they could be there.
It is a human emotion.
The dying man
Went back at first to his battles, as soldiers do.
He was pushing a new advance
With the old impatience and skill, over tangled ground,
A cloudy drive that did not move as he willed
Though he had it clear in his mind. They were slow today.
“Tell A. P. Hill to push them—push the attack—
Get up the guns!”
The cloudy assault dispersed.
There were no more cannon. The ground was plain enough now.
He lay silent, seeing it so, while the watchers listened.
He had been dying once, but that was a dream.
The ground was plain enough now.
He roused himself and spoke in a different voice.
“Let us cross the river,” he said, “and rest under the shade of the trees.”