Fabrication of Ancestors

For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil war, my father said.

The old wound in my ass

has opened up again, but I

am past the prodigies

of youth’s campaigns, and weep

where I used to laugh

in war’s red humors, half

in love with silly-assed pains

and half not feeling them.

I have to sit up with

an indoor unsittable itch

before I go down late

and weeping to the storm-

cellar on a dirty night

and go to bed with the worms.

So pull dirt up over me

and make a family joke

for Old Billy Blue Balls,

the oldest private in the world

with two ass-holes and no

place more to go to for a laugh

except the last one. Say:

The North won the Civil War

without much help from me

although I wear a proof

of the war’s obscenity.

Copyright Credit: Alan Dugan, “Fabrication of Ancestors” from Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry. Copyright © 2001 by Alan Dugan. Reprinted by permission of Seven Stories Press, www.sevenstories.com.

Source: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2001)