NEWS

In your family, the news is always late.
Think of messages stuffed into saddlebags
bound for the tip of Texas, or words stuck
inside bottles in the mid-Atlantic gyre.
But news that leaches, drip by drip, down
to the water table, comes oozing at last
out of your kitchen tap. So you learn
your deep-voiced six-foot son has always
been your daughter. Your mom lets drop
she had a baby who got “flushed away”
when you were two, and do you hear it
whimper in the night? Your folks admit,
having to explain that thing at last,
that in your father’s right temporal lobe,
a subtle “calcium” has grown and grown,
and time to share is hanging by a thread.
And the work that you are called to do,
wear yourself to pieces doing, turns out
not to be your work. The real work is
to open into love. You haven’t half begun.
But then, truth is slower than the news.

REENACTMENT
(The Battle of Cedar Creek)

In Middletown, the pasture’s sprouting
white: long rank on rank of tents,
spread signatures to gather and to sew
for the blank Book of Judgment.
Bleach of picked bones, of fogged sleep
as the enemy rolls in, of canvas
innocence, to be splashed apple-red.

Come each October, they are sprung again,
these fruiting bodies from the mingled
mass below: webbing the grievous dark,
nine thousand lifelines tangled, blue and gray.
On fresh straw the play soldiers sleep,
in unwashed wool, in flesh corruptible, till
the resurrected dream lifts them, and drops.

Today South wins; tomorrow North.
They come for the larking fife, the pummeling
drum, the whipping flags; for the smooth surge
in the furrow often plowed; for Death, familiar
black-snouted Death lugged back upon its leash;
for Hate crammed deep in the coiled bore
and the easy fix of the oiled bayonet.

A yell kills the loudspeaker’s civil gloss.
The lines stoop to the gully, sweep to the crest
and the slain prop themselves to look
and the captured nurse their guns for another round.
And the crowd marches home, long rank on rank,
eyes hazed with sulfur, ears deaf with blanks,
each heart bearing its bag of shot, its powder horn,
its undeveloped pictures wound up tight.

THE BLACKBOARD MONITOR

The noon bell shook the others out to lunch.
I was the chosen child. I stayed behind.
In a loud wash of silence I crept forward,
right to the teacher’s wall. It was bigger
than I had supposed, a whole sky written
full of constellations. But I had my job.
Squeezing in each hand a block of felt,
I started to swipe. I had to undo hours
of math, labored divisions, lumbering
sums; heaps of jungle-gym constructions
where dependent clauses dangled by a hair
from verbs; piles of dead dates when wars
began and stopped. My ten-year-old arms
swiped erratic arcs like gosling wings.

Finally a blackness lay exposed, not clean,
but cleaner, new and slick enough for me
and the rest of us to write on. Not today,
but soon, we were going to get our turn.
We could draw truer shapes, free-form;
maybe they would jump out of the frame.
We could make up new words, a ground
not populated yet, unfenced. Our figures
could verge on infinity. I never guessed
how we would just pretend we didn’t see
pale lines bleeding through, rising again,
weight of the old, the labeled, the already
divided. So I clapped. A cloud of chalk
settled as I closed the classroom door.