Facing
South
A
journeyman’s domain,
this
broken realm of miles and sky,
island
clouds, the storm’s remains, archipelago nimbus
adrift
in the blue... the cold summer strengthens late,
mist
departing, England’s chill offering
to
a foreigner at forty: expatriate weather,
bristling
stencil of twisted pines sentinel at the gate.
A
thread of thunder frays,
rising
through heat on a dusty road,
end
of the road where the road advances.
A
recollection of my country, when brothers
were
strangers with a stranger’s cause—
the
lake face of the diary stirs,
a
memory through fluted shallows
of
war, the tattered field of Stars and Bars
lost
when Jackson fell: hot steel and heart,
Stonewall
our glory
The
night goes by, the day
a
servant with a silver tray, this too goes by,
time
remembered in the promises we made,
in
letters and the flowers pressed in books,
origami
tucks of time refined in razor folds,
beneath
a faded colonnade
faint
fragrance of still fainter lives,
chords
of music in the empty room,
sudden
voices gathering, then gone.
The
magnolia’s acid scent is with us.
By
torchlight the blossom showers,
stamen
trembling in the dark,
ribbons
pinned to tunics marching past.
In
sixty-five, our Shenandoah cause wore out,
rising
from the corpses
like
the damped remainder of the spinet’s airs.
Pale
suburban features, traffic washing by,
the
bright badge fades in frozen ditches
and
the woods are braided with our dead,
restless
strangers to the Appomattox peace.
Folding
time, they shelter in the hero’s likeness:
fugitive
creatures in the shade of Lee.
Rebels
fall, yet we who enter in the fire and live
are
saved from nothing, with nothing to forgive.
To
Richmond on the avenues,
on
paths of burning stone, bring the Jubilee.
The
ghost walking with you is your own.
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