In a pot of queen’s delight, in the pokeberry sap,
I will dye it red and black in the fool’s old colors
And send it to him, wrapped in a calico rag,
To keep him warm through the rain. It will keep him warm.
And women in love do better without a heart.
What fools we are to wait the wheel of the year,
The year will not help our trouble. What fools we are
To give our parti-colored hearts to the rain.
I am tired of the slogans now and tired of the saving,
I want to dance all night in a brand-new dress
And forget about wars and love and the South and courage.
The South is an old high house full of charming ladies,
The war is a righteous war full of gallant actions,
And love is a white camellia worn in the hair.
But I am tired of talking to charming ladies
And the smell of the white camellia, I will dye
My hands twice as black as ink in the working waters
And wait like a fool for bitter love to come home.
He was wounded this year. They hurt him. They hurt you, darling.
I have no doubt she came with a bunch of flowers
And talked to your wound and you like a charming lady.
I have no doubt that she came.
Her heart is not parti-colored. She’ll not go steeping
Her gentle hands in the pulp and the dead black waters
Till the crooked blot lies there like a devil’s shadow,
And the heart is stained with the stain.
If I came to the bed where you lay sick and in fever,
I would not come with little tight-fisted flowers
But with the white heron’s plume that lay in the forest
Till it was cooler than sleep.
The living balm would touch on your wound less gently,
The Georgia sun less fierce than my arms to hold you,
The steel bow less stubborn than my curved body
Strung against august death.
They hurt you, darling, they hurt you and I not with you,
I nowhere there to slit the cloth from your burning,
To find the head of the man who fired the bullet
And give his eyes to the crows.
House, house, house, it is not that my friend was wounded,
But that you kept him from me while he had freedom,
You and the girl whose heart is a snuffed white candle—
Now I will curse you both.
Comely house, high-courteous house of the gentle,
You must win your war for my friend is mixed in your quarrel,
But then you must fall, you must fall, for your walls divide us,
Your worn stones keep us apart.
I am sick of the bland camellias in your old gardens,
Your pride and passion are not my pride and my passion,
I am strangling to death in your cables of honeysuckle,
Your delicate lady-words.
I would rather dig in the earth than learn your patience,
I have need of a sky that never was cut for dresses
And a rough ground to tear my hands on like lion’s clothing,
And a hard wheel to move.
The low roof by the marches of rainy weather,
The sharp love that carries the fool’s old colors,
The bare bed that is not a saint’s or a lady’s,
The strong death at the end.
They hurt you, darling, they hurt you, and I not with you,
I nowhere by to see you, to touch my darling,
To take your fever upon me if I could take it
And burn my hands at your wound.
If I had been there—oh, how surely I would have found you,
How surely killed your foe—and sat by your bedside
All night long, like a mouse, like a stone unstirring,
Only to hear your slow breath moving the darkness,
Only to hear, more precious than childish beauty,
The slow tired beat of your heart.”
Wingate sat by a smoky fire
Mending a stirrup with rusty wire.
His brows were clenched in the workman’s frown,
In a day or a week they’d be back in town,
He thought of it with a brittle smile
That mocked at guile for its lack of guile
And mocked at ease for its lack of ease.
It was better riding through rainy trees
And playing tag with the Union spies
Than telling ladies the pleasant lies,
And yet, what else could you do, on leave?
He touched a rent in his dirty sleeve,
That was the place that the bullet tore
From the blue-chinned picket whose belt he wore,
The man who hadn’t been quick enough,
And the powder-burn on the other cuff
Belonged to the fight with the Yankee scout
Who died in Irish when he went out.
He thought of these things as a man might think
Of certain trees by a river-brink,
Seen in a flash from a passing train,
And, before you could look at them, gone again.
It was more important to eat and drink
Than give the pain or suffer the pain
And life was too rapid for memory.
“There are certain things that will cling to me,
But not the things that I thought would cling,
And the wound in my body cannot sting
Like the tame black crow with the bandaged wing,
The nervous eye and the hungry craw
That picked at the dressing-station straw
Till I was afraid it would pick my eyes
And couldn’t lift hand to beat it off.
I can tell the ladies the usual lies
Of the wild night-duels when two scouts clash
And your only light is his pistol-flash;
But I remember a watering-trough
Lost in a little brushwood town
And the feel of Black Whistle slumping down
Under my knees in the yellow air,
Hit by a bullet from God knows where …
Not the long, mad ride round the Union lines
But the smell of the swamp at Seven Pines,
The smell of the swamp by Gaines’s Mill,
And Lee in the dusk before Malvern Hill,
Riding along with his shoulders straight
Like a sending out of the Scaean Gate,
The cold intaglio of war.
‘This is Virginia’s Iliad,’
But Troy was taken nevertheless—
I remember the eyes my father had
When we saw our dead in the Wilderness—
I cannot remember any more—
Lucy will wear her English gown
When the Black Horse Troop comes back to town,
Pin her dress with a silver star
And tell our shadows how brave we are.
Lucy I like your white-and-gold—”
He blew on his hands for the day was cold,
And the damp, green wood gave little heat:
There was something in him that
