Ode To The Confederate Dead

Row after row with strict

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed

Pile up, of nature the casual

To the seasonal eternity of death;

Then driven by the fierce

Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,

They sough the rumour of mortality.

Autumn is desolation in the

Of a thousand acres where these memories

From the inexhaustible bodies that are

Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.

Think of the autumns that have come and gone!—Ambitious November with the humors of the year,

With a particular zeal for every slab,

Staining the uncomfortable angels that

On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:

The brute curiosity of an angel's

Turns you, like them, to stone,

Transforms the heaving

Till plunged to a heavier world

You shift your sea-space

Heaving, turning like the blind crab.     Dazed by the wind, only the wind     The leaves flying,

You know who have waited by the

The twilight certainty of an animal,

Those midnight restitutions of the

You know—the immitigable pines, the smoky

Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,

The cold pool left by the mounting flood,

Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.

You who have waited for the angry

Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,

You know the unimportant shrift of

And praise the

And praise the arrogant

Of those who

Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision—Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.     Seeing, seeing only the leaves     Flying, plunge and

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,

Turn to the inscrutable infantry

Demons out of the earth—they will not last.

Stonewall,

Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp.

Shiloh,

Antietam,

Malvern Hill,

Bull Run.

Lost in that orient of the

You will curse the setting sun.     Cursing only the leaves crying     Like an old man in a

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks

With troubled fingers to the silence

Smothers you, a mummy, in time.                    The hound

Toothless and dying, in a musty

Hears the wind only.                    Now that the salt of their

Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,

Seals the malignant purity of the flood,

What shall we who count our days and

Our heads with a commemorial

In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,

What shall we say of the bones, unclean,

Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?

The ragged arms, the ragged heads and

Lost in these acres of the insane green?

The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;

In a tangle of willows without

The singular screech-owl's

Invisible lyric seeds the

With the furious murmur of their chivalry.     We shall say only the leaves     Flying, plunge and

We shall say only the leaves

In the improbable mist of

That flies on multiple wing;

Night is the beginning and the

And in between the ends of

Waits mute speculation, the patient

That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar

For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

What shall we say who have

Carried to the heart?

Shall we take the

To the grave?

Shall we, more hopeful, set up the

In the house?

The ravenous grave?                                    Leave

The shut gate and the decomposing wall:

The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,

Riots with his tongue through the hush—Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!