Ghost Confederacy

They were the uncountable stars, the first time

We saw them, they were the glitter and the distance.

We were the swimming shapes of trees, that cast

Of shade extending over their tents. We hid

In ravines, but not to be one with nature.

We knew what being one with nature really meant.

~

And we were never the color-blind grasses,

We were never the pattern of the snake

Fading into the pattern of the leaves;

We were the empty clarity one glimpses

In water falling, in water spreading into

A thin white veil on what is never there,

The moment clear and empty as a heaven

Someone has just swept clean of any meaning.

~

In summer and reattach the amputated limbs

Of boys. But the moment, clouding over,

Becomes again only an endless slipping of water

Over the spillways, and falls roaring in the ears

Until they ring, and the throat swollen

With failure and desire mingling there.

I could taste it in my mouth for days. It tasted

Like the wafer a friend said the Holy Ghost

Came wrapped up in. The Holy Ghost tastes like dust.

It liberates the body from the body so riddled

With rifle holes you can look right through us.

Look through us to what? To slums and shopping malls?

To one suburb joining another? Who grieves

On minimum wages? Look through us to that place—

Within sight of the trailer park and the truck stop—

Where Gettysburg could not be reenacted,

Where what was left of us on either side

Lay down our rifles, wept, embraced each other once.

That dust you taste in the Holy Ghost is us,

Dust ground into the windows you gaze out of,

And whether those windows burn or whether lights

Come on again in rows of quiet houses is a matter

Of how you treat him, sitting over there and still

Bleeding from a bad haircut, that captured soldier, that

Enemy, that risen dust, that boy, that stranger, you.