More Historical Stuff

American Histories
Out of the glee of a lately entered war
With songs of Yankee Doodle Dandying
Over There, after kicking Kaiser Bill's
Heinie ass, came the growth of Wall
Street, speakeasies, and Stutz Bearcats--
So it was in the time of my father's youth.

Out of the hunger of long breadlines
Where railroad builders beside piles of apples
Bub-bubbed in Bing's voice, "Brother,
Can You Spare a Dime?" came news across
The seas, blitzkrieg, and the Willys Jeep--
So it was in the time of my brother's youth.

Out of the sleep of Eisenhower, the sass
Of Kennedy, and the movement of those
We politely called Negroes, into the Dulles-
Cold swamp of an Asian civil war came
Hippies, rock and roll, and the VW Beetle--
So it was in the time of my own green youth.

How History Happens
Out of the sight of his absent cavalier Stuart,
Lee accepts reluctantly the word of a civilian spy
Whom Longstreet had had the sense to employ
To learn just where the Federal forces lay,
That dragon he had marched north to distract
From its besieging of his Virginia castle.

Outside Chambersburg in a thinned-out stand of elms,
Searching the map for a place of converging roads
Where he might convoke the columns of his troops,
Lee's finger hovers, hovers, falls, and he says, "Here."
Meanwhile, southward, silver in his purse, a survivor
Whistles, crossing a river on a wrecked railroad trestle.

At City Point, Virginia
They are watching me,
And I am watching them
Watching me.

I leave my tent. They watch me.
I piss against a tree. They watch me.
I light a good cigar. They watch me.

Someone has set them, I suppose,
To watching me, these bright young officers
This camp is, all of a sudden, filled with.

I wonder, when their watching day is done,
Where do their grammatically correct reports go?

To Secretary Seward? Very likely.
To President Lincoln? I doubt it.

Someone north of here, in the District,
I'm sure, has read my record,
And decided, given the givens,
We must keep a close eye on him.

I think they are primed to catch me with my lips
Kissing the mouth of a bottle of Old Crow.

I disappoint them, drinking water only.
I disappoint myself, drinking water only.

I wish crazy Bill Sherman were here,
But no--he's out storming the Carolinas,
The redheaded lucky son of a bitch.

Upriver, Old Marse Robert Lee
Has him a tent--no, a house--
A fine snug brick one in the heart of downtown
Richmond, tended to by old family retainers.

Is there anyone, I wonder,
This hour, watching him?

Has Mr. Davis detailed
Some bright young men
From The Citadel or V.M.I.
To keep watch on him.

I think not.

Besides, what could they report?
He's out back feeding apples to Traveller?
He's at his Bible again?

Well, whether or not anyone else is,
I'm watching him.

And if that pious bastard so much as sets
One polished knee-high foxhunter's boot
Outside the city, I'll be on him--

On him and on his whole damned
Army of Northern Virginia
Like a blood-hungry tick dropping down
On the back of a scrawny coon hound.

And all these watchers here, watching me?

They can take their watching and all their
Written-by-the-rules-they-learned-at-Harvard
Reports and stuff them up
Their rosy-red Republican rear ends.

Go ahead, Bobby Lee, go ahead.
Make your goddamned move. I'm watching.
Oh, you can bet your aristocratic ass,
I'm watching.

With my fly buttoned crooked,
With my good cigar gone out,
And thirsty as a country-ham-fed dog--
I'm watching.

Two From The Sixties
I. Vietnam
Somewhere this night
Outside a palmed
And plastic camper's park
On the edge of a Florida swamp
An insanely happy
Suburban cat
Is stalking a heron
On an alligator's back.

II Bedtime Story
Once upon a time
Three little bears
(Who were probably brown)
Had a little white girl
Bussed in on them
From across the town.

The World Turned Upside Down
Just where and when I first learned of Vietnam, I know:
At a Labor Day barbecue in the crowded backyard
Of an end rowhouse in Northeast Philadelphia,
While the sun was sliding down behind all the unknown world
West of the Schuylkill River--there and then a young woman
Whose name, face, and body I have long since forgotten,
By way of making small talk, as people will, meeting
A stranger at a party, pointed down the street with a gesture
Of her beer bottle and said, "See that house, the third one there?"

My memory now is that I had just taken a bite
Of a hot dog and could only nod that Yes indeed I saw,
And stayed speechless for other reasons when I heard her say,
"Their youngest boy was killed in Vietnam last week."
She moved the bottle's neck in a small lateral arc
And stopped, lining up a house on the cross street, saying,
"Like their oldest was last month. I went to grade school with him
At St. Matt's on the Boulevard. And over there--" the bottle moved
To yet another house--"their son, the Marine?
He's at the Naval Hospital on Broad Street without his legs."

Now, more than ten thousand days to the day, I have forgotten much,
But never my stunned first awareness of a war being waged almost
Surreptitiously, unknown to all but some in some houses
A pretty girl could indicate with not even half a body's turn.
Only years later--after more holidays, more hot dogs,
More failures to see the pointings-out of pretty girls--
Would that semi-secret war become too public not to be brought
To its squalid end, until at last we left, as the British abandoned
Once our own rebellious land with drumroll and fife-squeal,
Drowning out the sobs of Hessian mothers for their sold-out sons.

November 11, 1989
Seventy years and one since
The soldiers of my father's war
Crouched in their clay trenches
And kicked French rats away.
This night in a transatlantic pub
I heard a bunch of slightly
Drunk people gathered around
An ill-tuned piano singing
The songs of that campaign,
And thought how soon, how soon
The lot of us in this smoky room
Would be a long, long way
From Tipperary, over there, over there,
Unremembered to Herald Square.

9/11/01
Never again snow
Falling ash against the sky
Between those towers.

The Old Drum Beaten Again
--October 2002
I heard on TV the other night
The second Bush declare
That it was time again for us
To clear Iraqi air.

The telecast brought back to mind
Sly Lyndon and Slick Dick
Who in my past on grainier sets
Had brandished TR's stick.

This barker, like all the others,
Will get what he desires,
Whipping up with fear and flags
High patriotic fires--

And young men in ignorance
Will march and not come back.
I took careful aim with my remote
And turned the screen to black.

Panta Rhei, March 2003
They have borne helmets and body armor before,
Those rivers, Tigris, Euphrates,
All the way back to those whose fear of The Afterlife
Was not of Hell, but Hades.

Those waters have passed all manner of passing empires
In History's ebb and flood,
And will flow on indifferent to this new influx,
This young American blood.

Home Front
Amid TV flicker and toys left everywhere
By their preschool children, they wait, soldiers' wives,
Withing the thin plasterboard walls of houses
On a base in the flat hot South Georgia sun
For the knock on the warped screen door
Of a chaplain with an officer in dress uniform,
Knowing their men now in a slow one-at-a-time war,
The huge assaults over, the carriers sailed home
To sunlit embraces on a San Diego pier.

Having heard white men in blue suits with red ties
Pronounce in Washington the objective achieved,
They wait in a deceptive American peace
Of Wal-Mart shopping, TV flicker and toys,
Toys left everywhere by their preschool children,
Sure that any one of them might yet be handed soon--
Under murmured words of a nation's gratitude
From the mouth of a gold-braided Honor Guardsman--
The soft three-cornered pillow of a folded American flag.