Childhood's End, and: Swamp Blossoms

Childhood's End

In the vastness of this field I am reading a plaqueabout a Civil War skirmish that resulted in nine dead,while a lone deer is threading its way through the tall grasstoward a line of cottonwoods and the river. And I amremembering my uncle who was wounded in the neckduring the invasion of Sicily and who later spent timein a sanitarium with TB, passing the long weeksof his quarantine building with his hands a fully riggedsailing ship to deliver later to his nephew, who would sailit a few weeks later in a muddy creek and ignite itwith three cherry bombs. After my uncle diedin a car accident outside of Milwaukee in the rain, his wifeand infant child came to visit, and I remember how she spankedthe boy each time he cried and how I couldn't helpbut turn away, for the child cried more loudly with each blow,while the blows grew more fierce in precise concertwith the shrieks; and soon I was a young man and readingWhitman in college for the first time, studying his descriptionsof the field hospitals: the smell of ether and the odor of blood,and a young dying soldier calmly closing his eyes while Whitmansped forth into the darkness, marching down the unknown road.My daughters, who are growing weary of watching the deerfleeing from our presence, now begin picking giant purple astersin the field where the soldiers shed their life's blood, and I amremembering the beauty of that great ship in the muddy water,sailing while the fuses of the three cherry bombs burned.

Swamp Blossoms

Here is the watery grave. We are notslave to it. This is not forever.The augury of stone lifting as statuaryin the old field beside the oxbow lake.How pale the sky appears.The skin of it representing itself as light.Blossoming and calling and calling.And from these shallow watersthe yellow flags and pickerelweedsand white water lilies aflamewith summer. This is what it meansto cry out as peeper frogs and chorus frogs.What it means to be a cottonmouthslipping like ripe fruit into the lake.How maligned the night is:the old skull of moon bloomingas bone white amid the tupelos and willows.While the young lovers are slipping downinto the swamp, offering their naked skinand blood to the mosquitoes.Anointed in starlight. The ash of watercongealing into fetid loam. Surely a childwill be formed in the young woman's belly.And then the rains will fall. Stirring the watersinto foam. Washing the body. Then laterthe child will be born in the cabinby the lake. The blood blossomingon the bed sheets. We are not slave to it.The plosives of wings outside the windowas the cranes and egrets take flight.