After the fields of France,
life & death in the fields of home
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Her Father's War
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On the very morning that she was born,
he collected and packed them up for good;
a few he consigned to the bottom drawer
of an upstairs bureau ~ the rest he stowed
in an iron-bolstered trunk in the barn:
the moth-balled remains of a buried war.
For a dozen years they were sealed away,
interred like a memory long-suppressed,
till she asked him once, on a winter day,
if he'd been in the war. He looked surprised.
"Come to the barn," he said. When he lifted
the lid of the trunk, she saw a folded
winterfield jacket, an overseas cap,
a compass, canteen, and a battered cup. |
When later she asked again of the war
such innocent things were all he revealed.
If it hadn't been for a door left ajar
one night, as her father sat up alone
by the open trunk, she'd never have known
of the other objects he kept concealed:
a holstered pistol, cartridges, medals,
foreign citations unrolled from a tube
and darker relics retrieved in battle
from the rocks and ravines of Belleau Wood:
iron crosses and buckles, a bayonet
with its hilt the form of an eagle's head,
all torn from bloody tunics of the dead
and then smuggled home in a service kit.
Later that spring, on Memorial Day,
her father and other veterans marched
the length of a cedar-lined path to pay
respects to the local fallen. She thrilled
at how stern he appeared among the men,
at how smartly he bore himself, unmatched
in the curt retort and snap of his drill.
She shuddered to hear the synchronized crack
of volleys fired again and again
from a line of rifles slanted above
the white wooden cross of a soldier's grave.
Observing the set of her father's face,
like statuary, she pondered the lack
of expression, the marble stare into space.
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That night, as she huddled asleep in bed,
a spasm of coughing rose from below
to disorient her dream, coughing so
consumptive she woke with a nauseous dread.
She tried to ignore it, turning her head
to stare at the silhouette of a silo
beyond the window, surrounded by stars.
But it was impossible not to think
of the deathly noise. Stealing downstairs,
she followed light to the kitchen where, as
her father had never spoken of gas,
she was startled and scarcely understood
when he buckled abruptly at the sink
and brightened all its enamel with blood.
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Last Stand
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When he woke in a cloud of pain to find
that he'd been installed in a narrow bed
in a strange room, a part of his mind
returned to the morning he lay half-dead
in the Argonne Forest, awaiting help,
expecting deliverance, counting upon
a fellow Marine ~ but no such hope
supported him now. He was on his own.
He ripped that abomination, that tube
and needle, ripped it out of his vein
and, laying hold of the lamp like a club,
he raised a thunderous shout till a rain
of running feet on linoleum poured
indignantly down the hall to his door.
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Like Bowie near death at the Alamo,
propped against pillow with pistol cocked,
the old man waited for faces to show
in the open door and launched his attack,
hurling bedpan, lamp and telephone
at the scrambling nurses. They had him packed
and escorted home within the hour.
That evening, dug in like a cornerstone
on his own farm, resolutely locked
against all reason, lord of his tower,
he defied his family's threats and pleas
till they crow-barred the door and found him dead,
draped in a coat, sitting upright in bed,
a Winchester rifle across his knees.
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Both of these poems originally appeared in
The Sewanee Review.
They were later reprinted in
Sparrow: a Yearbook of the Sonnet.
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