Rules
of Engagement
No
snow now, only the memory of it,
yet
April, insufficient still
except
to tease each tree to leaf
then
black the scent, infers a present
old
enough and no older, the future stalled,
in
a ditch-water sky the sun a hawk shape
faint
above the cedars.
I
came this far returning, from a cold spring
this
close remembering why I came.
My
flight to a lost world
claims
back twenty years, a deep breath
held
and held until I surfaced, just once,
back
home, until then
a
place where the dead and living stood unchanging,
all
of one house in one memory,
the
way memory remains
unchanged,
faces and lives left standing
clear-edged
in the mind
asking
directions to a voice, its echoes.
Below
the Mason-Dixon
everything
and nothing changes.
The
19th century slinks by the Chevy showroom,
the
lakeside condo views.
The
maples are bigger now, vast canopies,
a
tendril vastness of shade
dwarfing
the old house— Mother in the yard
with
the dead she counts on one hand,
on
the other the living counted down
one
by one to last addresses, cancer, each divorce,
a
reconciliation no nearer
for
the names recalled across time and these states.
These
rebel towns are all the same:
the
courthouse lawn, divot rednecks
arguing
the war— the Civil
War—
the
shadow bronze of the Confederacy
a
birdshit glaze all summer.
The
past, its terrible beauty,
decorates
each volunteer.
Where
you been?
…
Away.
The
sun-break of oak along wide lanes,
in
the stands pretty girls
baring
midriff tans, at the field’s edge
the
immaculate diamond’s early innings—
‘If
I knew then…’, but what do I know
except
that pretty girls are harvested,
boys
now lean and quick move slower
every
game, that the world itself slows
and
no one can replace the day
within
a field of bright days.
A
white timber house, its shutters
closed
against the heat, by the porch
the
rambling reds of roses, reminds me
someone
I knew lived here, in war time,
in
a fragrance of pain, TV deaths less real somehow,
in
a child’s throat
waves
of jellied fire
burning
through a million boxes
as
we watched the Superfortress passing,
remote
as a god.
Outside
the town, old redoubts,
the
old betrayal of armies from an older war
met
in abstract time, each soldier’s soul
commended
to a retrospective heaven
North
or South—
I
read about it in a book, the cemetery
stripped
of railings for a prisoners’ stockade.
Salvation
was sudden for civilians at their rest.
Beyond
age, or childbirth, or the cholera
that
set them deep in iron perimeters,
paradise
came open-plan.
Maybe Jesus saves,
but
in the rules of engagement
tomorrow
is a land cured of memory,
where
death means breathing easy
and
time sanctifies and frees.
Here
is yesterday, the secret slave,
the
earth cleared grave by grave
along
the path I took, the name
made
for it but never shared—
in
the mouth a kept coal,
its
bitten heat.
