After the Wilderness

MAY 3, 1863

When Clifford wasn’t back to camp by nine,

I went to look among the fields of dead

before we lost him to a common grave.

But I kept tripping over living men

and had to stop and carry them to help

or carry them until they died,

which happened more than once upon my back.

And I got angry with those men because

they kept me from my search and I was out

still stumbling through the churned-up earth at dawn,

stopping to stare into each corpse’s face,

and all the while I was writing in my head

the letter I would have to send our father,

saying Clifford was lost and I had lost him.

I found him bent above a dying squirrel

while trying to revive the little thing.

A battlefield is full of trash like that —

dead birds and squirrels, bits of uniform.

Its belly racked for air. It couldn’t live.

Cliff knew it couldn’t live without a jaw.

When in relief I called his name, he stared,

jumped back, and hissed at me like a startled cat.

I edged up slowly, murmuring “Clifford, Cliff,”

as you might talk to calm a skittery mare,

and then I helped him kill and bury all

the wounded squirrels he’d gathered from the field.

It seemed a game we might have played as boys.

We didn’t bury them all at once, with lime,

the way they do on burial detail,

but scooped a dozen, tiny, separate graves.

When we were done he fell across the graves

and sobbed as though they’d been his unborn sons.

His chest was large — it covered most of them.

I wiped his tears and stroked his matted hair,

and as I hugged him to my chest I saw

he’d wet his pants. We called it Yankee tea.

Source: After the Lost War (1988)