Blue-Tail Fly

Contents

The Scale of Empire 1 A F T E R M AT H 1880, The Binding Tie 5 The Finishing Thoughts of Festus Spencer as He Looks into the Camera 12 I Frederick Douglass Speaks before the Anti–Mexican War Abolitionists 15 Ample Cause of War 16 General Taylor Convinces Himself That He Is for War 17 Doubt 18 Letter to the Governor of Texas 19 Notes from Officer Hitchcock’s Lost Leather Journal 20 Liberation 21 By the end 23 Three Hundred and Seventy-Two Miles from Home 24 Pokagon Accepts Colonel Taylor’s Invitation 26 Colonel Zachary Taylor Has Pokagon for Tea 27 The Escarpment 28 In Private Conversation: Buchanan to Like Minds 30 The Book Speaks of Pretenders 31 South of Houston 32 I I Civil Beginnings 35 Darling Wife 36 Grey Jebediah 37 The Bone Boiler 38 Contents Shadows 40 1864, Fragments of a Camp near Yorktown 41 1864, A Pocket Full of Rye 42 Snake Swamp 43 1863, Walt Whitman Reads to the Limbless, Dying 44 Linsey-Woolsey 45 1864, Dear Mother 46 Gettysburg: Blue and Grey 47 A Singular Dispersion over Franklin, Tennessee 49 Lincoln Dreams of Sarah, the Servant 51 “If Not for You” 52 1863, Detroit Riots, Again 53 1864, Dear Son 55 I I I Private Athens Descries 59 Hannibal of Athens, Georgia 60 White Glove Test 61 Private Smith’s Primer 62 Br’er Rabbit in Chickamauga 63 Drummer Boy 64 Interview: Survivor, Fort Pillow 65 A Second Dream of Sarah 66 Nigger Pine 67 Lincoln Speaks after the Bones Are Thrown 68 The White Immensities 69 Notes on the Poems 75 Credits and Acknowledgments 77 ...