The rain kept on through the night but nobody listened.
The parents talked for a while, then they fell asleep.
Even the new child slept with its fists tight shut.
Melora heard the rain for a single moment
And then deep, beautiful nothing. “Over,” she thought.
She slept, handfasted to the wilderness-stone.
Now the earth begins to roll its wheel toward the sun,
The deep mud-gullies are drying. The sluggish armies
That have slept the bear-months through in their winter-camps,
Begin to stir and be restless. They’re tired enough
Of leaky huts and the rain and punishment-drill.
They haven’t forgotten what it was like last time,
But next time we’ll lick ’em, next time it won’t be so bad,
Somehow we won’t get killed, we won’t march so hard.
“These huts looked pretty good when we first hit camp
But they look sort of lousy now—we might as well git—
Fight the Rebs—and the Yanks—and finish it up.”
So they think in the bored, skin-itching months
While the roads are drying. “We’re sick of this crummy place,
We might as well git, it doesn’t much matter where.”
But when they git, they are cross at leaving the huts,
“We fixed up ours first rate. We had regular lamps.
We knew the girls at the Depot. It wasn’t so bad.
Why the hell do we have to git when we just got fixed?
Oh, well, we might as well travel.” So they go on,
The huts drop behind, the dry road opens ahead. …
Fighting Joe Hooker feels good when he looks at his men.
A blue-eyed, uncomplex man with a gift for phrase.
“The finest army on the planet,” he says.
The phrase is to turn against him with other phrases
When he is beaten—but now he is confident.
Tall, sandy, active, sentimental and tart,
His horseman’s shoulder is not yet bowed by the weight
Of knowing the dice are his and the cast of them,
The weight of command, the weight of Lee’s ghostly name.
He rides, preparing his fate. In the other camps,
Lee writes letters, is glad to get buttermilk,
Wrings food and shoes and clothes from his commissariat,
Trusts in God and whets a knife on a stone.
Jackson plays with his new-born daughter, waiting for Spring,
His rare laugh clangs as he talks to his wife and child.
He is looking well. War always agrees with him,
And this, perhaps, is the happiest time of his life.
He has three months of it left. By the swollen flood
Of the Mississippi, stumpy Grant is a mole
Gnawing at Vicksburg. He has been blocked four times
But he will carry that beaver-dam at last.
There is no brilliant lamp in that dogged mind
And no conceit of brilliance to shake the hand,
But hand and mind can use the tools that they get.
This long way out of Galena. Sherman is there
And Sherman loves him and finds him hard to make out,
In Sherman’s impatient fashion—the quick, sharp man
Seeing ten thousand things where the slow sees one
And yet with a sort of younger brother awe
At the infinite persistence of that slow will
—They make a good pair of hunting dogs, Grant and Sherman,
The nervous, explosive, passionate, slashing hound
And the quiet, equable, deadly holder-on,
Faded-brown as a cinnamon-bear in Spring—
See them like that, the brown dog and the white dog,
Calling them back and forth through the scrubby woods
After the little white scut of Victory,
Or see them as elder brother and younger brother,
But remember this. In their time they were famous men
And yet they were not jealous, one of the other.
When the gold has peeled from the man on the gilded horse,
Riding Fifth Avenue, and the palm-girl’s blind;
When the big round tomb gapes empty under the sky,
Vacant with summer air, when it’s all forgotten,
When nobody reads the books, when the flags are moth-dust,
Write up that. You won’t have to write it so often.
It will do as well as the railway-station tombs.
So with the troops and the leaders of the bear-armies,
The front-page-newspaper-things. Tall Lincoln reviews
Endless columns crunching across new snow.
They pass uncheering at the marching-salute.
Lincoln sits on his horse with his farmer’s seat,
Watching the eyes go by and the eyes come on.
The gaunt, long body is dressed in its Sunday black,
The gaunt face, strange as an omen, sad and foreboding.
The eyes look at him, he looks back at the eyes;
They pass and pass. They go back to their camps at last.
“So that was him,” they say. “So that’s the old man.
I’m glad we saw him. He isn’t so much on looks
But he looks like people you know. He looks sad all right,
I never saw nobody look quite as sad as that
Without it made you feel foolish. He don’t do that.
He makes you feel—I dunno—I’m glad we could see him.
He was glad to see us but you could tell all the same
This war’s plumb killin’ him. You can tell by his face.
I never saw such a look on any man’s face.
I guess it’s tough for him. Well, we saw him, for once.”
That day in Richmond, a mob of angry women
Swarm in the streets and riot for bread or peace.
They loot some shops, a few for the bread they need,
A few for thieving, most because they are moved
By discontent and hunger to do as the rest.
The troops are called out. The troops are about to fire,
But Davis gets on a wagon and calms the crowd
Before the tumbled bodies clutter the street.
He never did a better thing with his voice
And it should be told. Next day they riot again,
But this time the fire is weaker. They are dispersed,
A few arrested. Bread grows dearer than ever.
The housewives still go out with their market-baskets,
But coffee’s four dollars a pound and tea eleven.
They come back with a scraping of this and a scrap of that
And try to remember old lazy, lagniappe days,
The slew-foot negro chanting his devilled crabs
Along the street, and the market-women piling
The wicker baskets with everything good and fresh;
Topping it off with a great green fist of parsley
That you used to pretty the sides of the serving-dish
And never bothered to eat. They improvise dishes,
“Blockade pudding” … “Confederate fricassee,”
Serve hominy grits on the Royal Derby china
And laugh or weep in their cups of willow-bark tea.
Davis goes back from the riot, his shoulders stooped,
The glow
