Our Memory, the Shining Leaves (Waterford Fair Civil War Reenactment)

From here it's hard to tell who's killing who

& I guess it's better this way,

not knowing the difference between the gray & the blue

& the stillness that answers each rifle shot with the only phrase

stillness can ever imagine itself saying:

at last we are here together.

It's an indulgent thought & that's why stillness never works.

It's too comfortable, too secure. I think you would agree

but I feel dumb asking because what good are questions

as the evening falls across our faces & the black oaks

at the edge of the field take on a pale yellow light

that the end of summer brings & the soldiers dying

their solemn deaths in front of us begin to believe

too much in themselves, in the blank crisp volley

of their voices: a decayed stone wall separating then & now.

It is to this that we should listen:

the space between the air & our bodies.

We don't belong here among the dead.

That is what they are, right? Trying to remember

is a kind of dying. Each pull of the trigger an elegy

for the body of a boy found by Union troops

in the ruined chimney of Gaines Mill,

for a photograph in a child's history book

of a field surgeon lunging with his amputating saw

at two dogs fighting over a canvas bag of opium.

How much simpler does it get?

Stillness says at last we are here but we shouldn't be.

You are too beautiful & I am too careless to want any of this.

The funnel cake, the candy apples, stove-pipe hats & horse-drawn carts

full of pumpkins & the brown cloth of dusk. The land rising slowly

into the pines, into the mountains, leaving the brittle grass lining the creek

& the town & the town's shadow behind in their silence: a silence

we're all used to, that we can't shake off & if we do, it's not us

that does the shaking. It's a cricket hopping from the grass to your knee,

the last day of summer & all we can do is wait for something to happen.

And it does. But never the way we want it.

Never the sudden sparrow there on your foot snipping the cricket

in two before it opens its big mouth. No, the cricket chirps & right there

summer unfolds & evening begins & you cup the poor dark song

in your hand & let it go.

It's not real a father says to his boy sitting on a bale of hay

behind us. They're not dying.

I look at him & know that for once in his life he is right.

The sad flinch that fathers give the world when their children

are shown too much or not enough makes him seem almost distant,

not wholly there, a part of the landscape & I begin to regret looking at him

as we regret anything that is crumbling right before us:

the ocean's shore: the shriek of the fox diffused by leaves.

We should be used to this sort of thing by now.

We should walk towards the white barn on the hill

where the lambs bite & snort at the children who get too close,

& forget about everything. Fold up the day into our sweaters,

hold each other closer than night or stillness can get.

And as the light carries us to the hill as though

we are flying into ourselves, shouldn't we finally,

after all of this, understand our lives?

Shouldn't we say what we meant to say?