Epistle

No one else can tell you about Stephen Crane’s

last dream of this earth,

but I can.

He is twenty-eight. He is listening

for the doomed soldiers singing

through the spruces of a wild

Confederate night,

and he can almost hear them.

We can almost hear them. They touch

the black-eyed Susans stitched

into the thinness of their woolen

hems, and they are silent.

They fold their hands against their breasts

where their hymnals would have been,

and they sing on.

When he wakes, Crane

will throw another copy of his Red Badge

onto the fire and cough

blood. Outside, the Black Forest

will sing nothing,

and the flames will rage on.

~

Nothing, his body

whispered, when he was asked what he’d been doing

with that wild-eyed woman

they’d found him carrying

into Jacksonville, Florida, the thick

pitch of the forest in her

satin, her crinoline like a city hymning

fire, and tonight, because

he is dying, and because he loves so completely

the music of his future

in the still-boyish embouchure of his consumptive

mouth, he will whisper it

again, over and over

and over: nothing, nothing,

nothing, until it sounds

like history, until it sounds like the spring’s wings

unraveling the last strength

in the rafters, the dun wings

in the forests of his heart.

And then he will slumber on.

O Shenandoah, the soldiers

sing, O Wide Missouri.

~

it is only because I have found

out, in a silo’s wall, a photograph

of my father’s boyish father

What I know of it

is this much, only: If history

is a young, combed colonel,

his face pressed in a carnation

in some city, his future

on the tattered bed behind him,

her fingers in the strap

between his shoulders, then

what she has wanted, what she has always wanted

to admit to him

is her terrible dream she be undone by him,

her terrible thirst

he be undone by her, like the blossoms

on his black belt she has tasted—crown

vetch, chicory, lobelia; knot

weed, heron’s bill, azalea. What he has wanted

is the amnesty of the particular.

~

Tonight

it is afterward and December

and if my father’s father has a boy’s life

in his own hands,

what I have wanted to tell you

is I have wanted to kill another man. What

I have wanted to show you

is the thin, Afghan boy

gagged and bound

to the shoulders

of his brother, a coin laid on his outstretched tongue

because, his inquisitor told him,

to swallow it was

mercy, because it would tumble, he was told,

heads or not-heads

on his forearms, when he tired.

And he would have to, he would have to tire.

This is not about history.

This is not about the young

Dutch painter who slept on the floor of his century,

his eyes lost

in the soft bells of his religion,

his starved heart like a wild pike

in a pharaoh’s tomb,

with only his fist

as his pillow. Nor how he lived

with that woman's body until it was holy.

This is not about the country within this country.

In the dream

~

within the dream that Crane

is dreaming, he has climbed up

to an ancient church

beyond the mountains,

and what he sees there is so simple

it could crush you:

not fire, not the wild

throes

of a martyr,

but the carved form of a young

saint

in the stone floor, her features worn

by the centuries of pilgrims.

She is so simple

even the shadows

forget her. She does not know

she is guarding Dante

in the mortared

wall; she does not know

of this stranger in the

threshold, that when he lies down on the cold stone

of her body,

he will ask her

what none have thought

to ask her:

not

for gold, not

for catacombs

of silver,

but for one more moment

of his dream again, sustains her.

He will ask again for the love that follows love.

Listen: if the afterlife

~

has the big, boyish eyes

of an anonymous martyr

hidden in full armor in the ranks of a Roman

legion, then tonight the spirit of Crane

isn’t looking for him

in a chorus of the ghost soldiers in the German

woods, their thin arms

interlocking in their blue wool,

the foliage of Savannah in their hair.

When he wakes

to find the wind has slipped

the hinges,

he will stumble out

into the ruins of the Teutonic

night, a daguerreotype

of Lincoln in his one

hand, a blossom

from Savannah in the other,

and will lie down in the coming rush of snow.

In the desert, the hymn

begins, in his pocket.

In the desert in the desert in the desert.

What he hears there is the mercy

of what can’t last: scrub oak, red-

wing, forsythia; O Shenandoah, O

America, O Missouri. What he hears there

is the fire within the fire.

~

But maybe Crane can hear

what the dead sing

to the living.

In the low fields, in a new moon,

they are waiting.

They are listening

to the dark flocks in the night

air. They are listening

for the dark wings in their own

hearts, their dark hearts

like the common loon

in the birches, its cleft breast

as subtle

in its severance

as the break between this bitter world

and another. But the bitter wings are bitter

and infolded. But the singing

of unfolding doesn’t come.

~

Listen: if the afterlife

is the medieval equestrian kneeling in the excavation

at Agincourt, still reined there

to the dressed heft

of this kingdom, then

I am telling you this

because winter comes

to winter. I am telling you

because the story is our story.

Once, in the high

pines above some city, where my father’s father

had lain down after slaughter, he woke

to see a gathering

of horses—blue roan, buck-

skin, pinto—

laying down their masked heads

on his forearms, his fingers in the swift rings

of their bridles, as they sniffed him through the bitters

of that wool.

But why

make his brief letters

merciless—they were horses, just horses

in December

undone without their cavalry

for water, and when he turned

to see a woman with her halters, when she turned

with a mocking wave

toward the far trough

and they left him in the ruins of that cold

place, he waited

and waited, and waited—

and it happened: the night came

in its steel shoes, the night laid

its bridle on his shoulder, the sacred, the ancient things

were still there, saying

listen, listen,

to the vanishing—

it comes, it does

come, though it goes.

~

Come, son,

I am talking to you

now. One day, when you are thirty-three

and exhausted, when you have stumbled out

beneath the dark stars

of your nation, when you have gone out

into union’s

end, or after, you may look out across the pastures

of your country

and hear nothing in the night air

but the night air, nothing on the far shore

but its ruin.

I will not be behind you, stranger.

I will not be the iron in the night air.

Go on. Go on

and hymn

to winter. Once, in a French town

spared no quarter, in its ancient

days, before my father’s

Bronx-born

father

was paraded through its bitter streets

in winter,

a bewildered

kid,

his dark hair strewn with petals,

the villagers awoke

to hear a strange song: the horses

of the occupying army

drifting swiftly through the not-yet-

sunlit cobbles,

their riders gone in an amnesty from reason.

scrub oak, red-

wing, forsythia;

lilac, swamp

rose, briar—

~

If only

we could wade out

after winter.

If only we could walk out

like those children, those wakers

in their night-

gowns, in their dark

hair, the ones

who wandered up

to still those horses

where they pressed their lips

to dark and iron

bridles, saying yes, O yes, my

brothers, as the rains

came, as the wild rains

traced their faces,

as the ancient gods that turned

the earth

were herded,

as the swift world tossed its real flesh in its chains.