Epiphanies of Death

Obscene Daydreams

I confess in the darkened booth, thrusting In coins for a minute of blue movie, That by sixteen I could handle a woman Doing ineffable things or having them Done to her. So at first blush all these Intimations about the intimate life Of Geli Raubal and the Führer she likes To call Uncle Alf shouldn’t disgust me— How he sweet-talks her into stripping For paintings, for intricate studies of where He should never have gone with prying eyes Or hands. I know where you think this might go, Those other bodies—less shapely in their stacks— which lie still, stun the lens—death As Spanish fly, the great dictator a Midas Of depravity twisting all he touches With his fondness for smutty postcards— That she’ll morph into Ilsa, she-wolf Of the ss with a long whip. But you’re wrong. Geli stays silly and seditiously sweet On his chauffeur, and Adolf a sad sack Out of his league, leading her white-gloved to Strauss In Munich, 1931, its ballrooms full Of Jews. She aims with his gun to leave This life if she can’t live without posing As someone she’s not, though even then, asleep In her own blood, she’s shameless reassurance That a boy’s adult daydreams on film And Hitler have nothing in common. Obscene Is his sobbing, her room used never again, Becoming a shrine, a chamber of his heart, The vase on a table, each delicate flower.

Ben-Hur Meets Billy the Kid, Lincoln, New Mexico, 1879

Governor Lew Wallace sits by a fire on the edge Of civilization, no guards or posse. He trusts His own dubious fiction, the part at the end Where Judah surrenders violent cause To holy purpose. But Billy comes alone As told, taps the door with his trembling pistol. Forget insidious rage and glib ambition; The ex-general believes he’s risen above Disgrace at Shiloh and commands flawlessly Within the bounds of his potboiler novel. He’s cooked up a plot no less far-fetched But real for the territory’s roughhousing, Tells Billy of God’s love, coaxes him to rein In the other killers. A frontier’s flickering room Becomes the movie’s clear line between rebel And rogue, goes to the heart of America Exactly at its desolate brink. But the Kid can’t Quite go straight, and Wallace doesn’t help him When he writes from jail, abandons him To the fate riffraff deserve, like the Apache, Even the docile Pueblo in whose adobe style The governor lives. A sword-and-sandal Western brings Us Roosevelt and Somoza, Nixon and Pinochet, The familiar saga of harnessed mayhem On the shifting border between republic And empire. By the book it’s Ben-Hur Who veers, Ben-Hur whose chariot disburses Justice with spiked hubs, Ben-Hur vindictive, Then vindicated, whipping his shining black horses.

Richard Kirkland, Marye’s Heights, 1862

After a day’s fighting the dying hold The marsh and drainage ditch, undisputed no man’s land Between armies. Besieged by groans, he advances Into it, his beaten enemies cheering Instead of firing. They see a rebel armed With canteens bend to mouths of dust, assault The usual assumptions dictated by the color Of a man’s uniform. Maybe conscience fetters Some unexpectedly, no matter how They’re raised, he by plantation slaves. Who knows If they’d have called a csa sergeant angel Like the troops on both sides, or, if now conscripted Into the lofty ranks, he’d have encroached Further on the definition of compassion And its target, stooping to black soldiers. There are none on the field to try the boundaries Of his confederate sympathies. But, to be Believed, he must become who he pretends, If only to revert to mundane failings and Join the dead at Chickamauga in nine months. What’s more hapless is how many thirst For such diluted epiphany: that thirst exists, That he’s quenched some, maybe even his own, Which gets him to another better world, If only a scarred hill near...