Poem of the Day

I finally have time to go back to my beloved Civil War memoirs. I just started Walter H. Taylor’s General Lee: His Campaigns in Virginia 1861-1865 with Personal Reminiscences. Of course, the Chickahominy has been mentioned already.

Leafless Trees, Chickahominy Swamp
By Dave Smith

Humorless, hundreds of trunks, gray in the blue expanse
where dusk leaves them hacked like a breastwork,
stripped like pikes planted to impale, the knots
of vines at each groin appearing placed by makers
schooled in grotesque campaigns. Mathew Brady’s
plates show them as they are, the ageless stumps,
timed-sanded solitaries, some clumped in squads
we might imagine veterans, except they’re only wood,
and nothing in the world seems more dead than these.

Stopped by the lanes filled with homebound taillights,
we haven’t seen the rumored Eagle we hoped to watch,
only a clutch of buzzards ferrying sticks for a nest.
In this history, that we want the unchanged, useless
spines out there to thrust in our faces the human
qualities we covet? We read this place like generals
whose promised recruits don’t show, who can’t press on:
we feel the languor of battle, troops unable to tell
themselves from the enemy, and a file-hard fear gone

indifferent in the mortaring sun that will leave all
night after night standing in the same cold planes
of water. It never blooms or greens. It merely stinks.
Why can’t we admit this is death’s gift, the scummy
scene of our pride, blown brainpans of a century ago?
Why do we sit and sniff the rank hours inside words
blunt as ground that only stares off our question: what
happened? Leaf-light in our heads, don’t we mean why
these grisly emblems, the slime that won’t swell to hope?

The rapacious odor of swamps all over the earth bubbles
sometimes to mist, fetid flesh we can’t see but know,
just cells composing, decomposing, a heart’s illusions.
God knows what we’d do in there, we say, easing back
on the blacktop. Once we heard a whistling. Harmonicas?
But who’d listen? Surely all was green once, fragile
as a truce, words braiding sun and water, as on a lake
where families sang. What else would we hope for, do
in the dead miles nothing explains or changes or relieves?