No More Worlds to Conquer

No More Worlds To Conquer

The Return of the Warriors

Remember, their boasts were legendary:
"And shall our God make stubble
for our swords.
And shall our God scatter their blood
like poppies . . ."

They each ride in a world apart,
cold wind in their unblinking eyes,
frets captured battle flags, their spurs,
the furniture of their horses
stay oddly silent . . . Two years.
Who could believe they left us for two years?
And are transformed, answer no more
to nicknames, answer to no one—
mother, brother, child—
even one another. Our priests acclaim
their victory. If these are conquerors,
O show us the defeated.

Garibaldi

Three poems for George Garrett

—Pianto dei Romani, near Calatafimi, Sicily, 19 April 1999

These terraces, this view, must be the same,
except for the way the centipede strada walks
on concrete stilts and except for the monument
whose size, brute ugliness, would have left
Garibaldi speechless, to search the streets
of Calatafimi for a Bourbon ambush or estimate
the cost. Given the ruinous price of rhetoric,
of stone (with the usual bribe tucked in a bribe
for someone) he could have bought his way.

Freed, with your back to this, it's easy
to imagine how close it must have been,
so few, most of them amateurs, students
from Bergamo, shoeshine boys, a handful
who'd fought in the Crimea, against Austria,
or in the Pampas wars, attempting the impossible.

And, easy to imagine, out of harm's way,
those readers of newspapers in Europe,
in America, who knew he had landed
at Marsala, those who could count
up to a thousand, among the morning
teacups or coffeecups, each laughing
his head off at such rank impudence:
"That Garibaldi fellow's mad, stark mad, my dear!"

Garibaldi II

—Pianto dei Romani, 15 May 1860

Each halt up that steep hill
to regroup under another terrace wall
is won
with breath and bayonet.

Heat makes the black
civilian coats and trousers
of these northerners
blacker.

Only that madman Garibaldi
in a red shirt under a heavy poncho
strides up the slope
his saber like a yoke
across his shoulders.

Stones and bullets fly:
"We can't retreat.
Then let the sun and Naples
eat us, Bixio!

"All of us die here
to confirm Cavour's 'fiasco.'
Or we leave
thirty to pay for Sicily.

"Sound that reveille
first played at Como.
Before those notes die out
we storm Palermo!"

Garibaldi III

—On 27 July 1861, William H. Seward, secretary of state, writes to the American minister in Brussels: "Tell him [Garibaldi] that he will receive a Major-General's commission in the army of the United States."

"Currently Dis-United." Garibaldi shrugs.
Once, making candles, an exile in New York,
he'd written, "This is a country
where one soon forgets one has a country."

That was before Cavour sold Nice,
where he was born, to France.
Outlawed from Italy twice, what patria
can he lay claim to but Caprera,

Lord like Ulysses of a barren island?
Its court of goats approached
through diplomatic channels,
the Northern states needing a general,

a Mr. Seward hoping to enlist
an honest butcher in a blood-red shirt
famous for losing troops, not battles.
("Free men, not conscripts. Ask the dead!")

Solely, from Montevideo on, a butcher?
Made mincemeat of in politics,
a banquet Banquo, a cartoonist's hero
of plaster busts, of street names—"Basta!"

Or "Libertà!" "Draw Lincoln's pay?
A major-general? Tell them I'll take
supreme command of all the armies
of the North. Or let them know

the Garibaldi Legion's not for sale
on any slave block, but to free
the slaves will fight under one leader
who reads and heeds no other orders!"

Had he accepted Seward's offer,
would he have served under a Burnside
at a Fredericksburg? . . . The North
found homegrown butchers. Unemployed

dies Garibaldi—arthritic, toothless,
at home among the browsing goats—
while all the wars...