Part Two
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Class
was what she hoped for a little more of
but wasn't holding her breath-- it was something
in short supply on the farm and valued
accordingly, like seedcorn or credit--
a thing to be cultivated with care
and hoarded like so many precious jars
of late-summer fruit. Class was a velvet
embroidered chair where the men never sat
in a parlor always dusted-- if only
she'd had a parlor-- so sometimes Class
was only a corner of yard fenced off
from the hogs where, tucked among onions,
she cherished a hidden bed of alyssum.
Class was keeping her six daughters clothed
in handmade dresses, not hand-me-downs,
while strictly admonishing every lapse
of grammar or bearing or common grace.
Class was a lyric by Longfellow learned
as a child and softly recited
(on mornings when all the men were afield)
to a disapproving chorus of hens.
Class was a few stolen moments sitting
alone at the kitchen table, slowly
turning a page in the WARD'S catalogue.
Class was something to do with great cities,
with distances traveled by night, a wordless
prayer in her child's heart and a silvery
horn from an east-bound express suspended
above the fields as she drifted to sleep.
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Nights by a Window,
Listening for a Train
After a year, the pain of his leaving
had settled within her as though a small
insidious seed had taken root
and folded her heart in filament.
As the morning of his departure passed
to the never-ending night of his absence,
the stark, untenanted rooms around her,
rooms of inveterate shadow her lamp
was powerless to dispel, and of cold,
indifferent walls that had never warmed,
in spite of the usual fire she kept--
each of the rooms closed in like a prison
whose windows could only return a pale
reflected face, a face she could scarcely
mark as her own, so hollow and white
and strange it had grown. In those unrelieved,
unrestful hours that made up her nights,
she could feel a filament of the seed
insinuating itself in her soul,
a seed of forboding that lay in wait
for the single thing that would draw it forth
to flower into a terrible grief:
a knock at the door and a telegram.
A night together as husband and wife
was all that circumstance had allowed,
a night which, lest he leave her widowed
with child, they spent in separate rooms,
joined by the distance that lay between them.
The following morning she rode with him
to the depot where, with orders to join
a battalion forming for duty in France,
he would board a train for camp in Virginia.
Parted by only the width of a hand
as they sat on the wagon's wooden seat,
they composed but a single silhouette,
belying the sense of isolation
that each began to feel in the other.
He urged the mare to a trot, but offered
little in the way of conversation
while she, in the grip of apprehensions
so strange and particular to herself
she could find no way to permit them voice,
sat wrapped in a silence deep as his own.
When they reached the station, she held him close
for a fiery instant, then rushed away
without looking back and hurried ahead
till she found herself on the outskirts of town
by the edge of a field, and there she stopped.
Somewhere off to the east she could faintly
distinguish the clack of wheel upon rail
suspended upon the late morning air...
and then it was lost completely, as though
she had only dreamed it, or only heard
the murmurous rasp of wind sweeping in
over acres of bleached and drying corn.
A lifetime of waiting had passed since then,
and letters received in the interval,
letters in envelopes mottled by rain
and mud from places unknown, each bearing
a censor's stamp and, for postage, a phrase--
each letter held something less of the one
she remembered, as though what kept them apart
had turned to a distance more than miles,
more than the lapse of time. She was helpless
to stay the gradual drifting apart
of something unnameable they had shared,
of a feeling altogether too frail
to survive the prolonged monotonies
and sporadic storms of a soldier's life,
or even the simple, merciless fact
that many letters took months to arrive
while many others were lost. She as well
might have sought to hold the peculiar, soft
and lyrical presence of light that filled
her room for an hour on certain days
in the aftermath of autumn. She felt
the close of a promise that once had lain
open between them-- she felt it now
like the close of evening beyond her door,
dimming the distant fields.
In the months
that followed, the dread she had always known,
the dread that he might be killed, was replaced
by something less understood, by a fear
whose origen she was uncertain of,
unless it began with an unexpected
darkness of phrase in one of his letters
or else with the premonitions that rose
unbidden as birds from out of a field--
a fear that he, in a part of his soul,
had suffered death of a different order,
a death to be nursed in his heart, to be borne
back into life, to the woman he loved,
like a plague-carrying ship into harbor.
And she felt, without the strength to admit
so much as a breath of it to herself,
that the leave her husband had taken of her
the morning after their wedding, had proven
final at last. He would not return.
The soldier who would survive to step down
from the somber train as it hissed to a stop,
who would search the crowd for her face until
he feels the touch of her hand on his arm
and hears his name spoken-- this same soldier
would turn to her with the eyes of a stranger.
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The Dark Fields
A rap at the door. She dropped her sewing,
disconcerted, and rose to her feet,
but already her husband had crossed the room
and stood at the window, peering through blinds.
"It's all right," he assured her, "they're neighbors."
He stepped to the door and opened it wide.
Four haggard faces stared back at him.
"You'd better come with us," one of them said,
"there's been a murder." The woman's hand
rose to her open mouth. She pleaded
"Al?" but her husband had put on his coat.
The men looked uneasy. "Give us a moment,"
he said to them. They returned to the dark.
"This isn't something they've seen before,"
he told her softly. He saw her shudder
and turn away. "Go on," she whispered,
"you'd better hurry."
How long after that,
how long after hearing the clatter of hooves
recede into silence, she sat alone
in the soft wavering light of a lamp
and stared at her hands, she could never say.
That which awaited her husband disturbed
a deeper part of herself than she knew
and, unaware that what he would find
at an isolated farm up the road
was a woman shot and a man hanged,
she imagined the killer loose in the night
and herself alone in the empty house.
Dimming the lamp, she moved to the window
and stared down the vacant road, unable
to fathom a thing in the heavy dusk,
unable to see where her husband stood
in a ring of silent men in a barn,
cutting a dead man down from a rafter.
Too many winter nights she had watched
at this same window, delving the darkness
beyond the reflected face in the glass,
beyond the porch and the yard, throughout
the months that her husband was overseas.
For weeks she had watched an old disfigured
oak on the hilltop, silhouetted
like a shape of anguish against the stars,
a shape nearly human, twisted in pain.
A voice from the Revelation of John
grew audible in those nights, a voice heard
as a child, hectored in ominous tones
from the depths of some evangelist's tent,
a voice that conjured apocalyptic
shapes from her own interior night,
shapes in a vapor that never resolved--
and now, as she stood alone in the house,
alone but for all the spectral fears
that closed upon her, she grew aware
of something with neither face nor form
against the sky on the hill, something stark.
Abruptly she ran to the kitchen door
and fled out across the yard to the gate,
tripping and stumbling but still running on,
away from the house, the hill, the road,
running until the remotest light
had vanished and there was nothing at all
but a black and indeterminate void
of field and starless sky and the sudden
unendurable pounding of her heart.
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Her Father's War
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 old 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.
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
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.
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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