The Cicerone at Antietam
(for W. S.)
J. Quinn Brisben
A perfect day for imperfect bodies:
The mild sun on the well-ramped walks
And glinting in the creek as the pair
Roll and gimp among memories of bodies
Suddenly shattered by a leadstorm;
Then hacked by quick unsterile
Surgeons with nothing to kill the pain;
How they would envy the cicerone’s
Plastic and aluminum knee, his elegant
Cane which blooms into a chair
For rest and close observation,
Also his friend the architect’s
Power chair humming subserviently,
Agile beyond the smoke-wreathed dreams
Of those who triaged snapped spines
To death tents and lopped limbs
While cursing and being cursed.
Like McClellan, they have the slows,
Drifting leftward on the union lines
Following the eruptions of death
Through the long day of 17 September 1862;
Hooker assaults Lee’s left flank;
He cannot reach the Dunker church;
Nor can they, the reconstructed building
Has too many steps; they lack ability
To deploy bodies where needed, again
Like McClellan; further left they note
No corn in Miller’s cornfield;
The sunken road is now on the level;
Sinking his cane the cicerone finds
The shallow fords ignored by Burnside,
Who let his troops be slaughtered by the bridge,
Then got across so late that A. P. Hill
Had marhced his troops to the field,
Driving unlucky Burnside back;
Then Lee withdrew, McClellan did not follow;
Upwards of a score of thousand corpses rotted,
One more bloody compounding of errors.
The architect asks: “So who won?
McClellan lost more men, but then
He had more men to lose, Lee had
The field but had to go back home,
McClellan should have pursued but did not.
Lincoln pretended the stalemate was a win,
Although he fired McClellan, then issued
The Emancipation Proclamation, a very
Tentative thing on a shaky base.”
The cicerone sees their wives
Approaching laden with a trove
And eager to move on; he knows
There is no ending on the surface
Of a sphere, nor in time moving all
At the rate of one minute per minute,
The past receding into warp and blur,
The future forever beyond our kenning.
Anyhow he speaks: “There is no victory
When so many die. Maybe Lincoln,
Everybody’s favorite rail-splitting
Corporation lawyer and bloody saint,
Our master of myth and spin control,
Did well to use this mess as fulcrum
To move a nation to a good end;
You and I are joined for a good end, too,
Usinbg what is at hand, which is all we have.
Come, no more time to rake this over,
Though it has been a good and useful pause,
It is time to roll the movement on.”
