The Sergeant

For my father

When others mustered out in '46, you soldiered

on, commanding a squad that buried the box

after narrow box the Army sent home from abroad.

For a year the wind off the Kasserine,

peasants mudded to their knees on Mindanao

and oceans being oceans all over the world

kept turning up dead

West Virginians.

You brought all the known soldiers home,

to Coal Fork, Seth, Clendinin,

to the smudged daguerreotypes of company shacks

that lay beyond slick rivers without bridges.

Your honor guard traveled the state that year

making heroes.

You and your men were heroes-

the War ceremonially perfect-

in hills the newsreels never reached.

Sometimes twice a day you stiffened

against the world's first standing order:

assigning remains to the last slit trenches

they would hold,

awarding the widows flags

they would bundle away under cedar

or hang on the wall of the child conceived

a month before Pearl Harbor.

*

You were occupied with death

and mother ironed

ten uniforms a week to keep you creased

and properly rigid. Starch drifted

like dry snow in parlor corners where I etched

stick figures in the dust-

my own command.

And I learned to fold the flags

into tight blue parcels of stars, to execute

the manual of arms with the snap

of a garrison corporal.

But you never said

"Death," or took me along to the hills.

Coming in to the warm laundry smells of your room,

I'd find you silently polishing brass or trying to coax

from your boots the last bright sheen the leather

remembered. And I knew I would rise the next morning

in darkness, roused by the small-bore crack

of your clothes-your limbs forcing open shined khaki-

to watch you go quietly off to your men.

*

One summer night you had the neighbors in the yard

for home-made peach ice cream and army films

projected on the flaking wall of the hen-house.

G.L's bridged the Rhine at Remagen; Jap bodies

spilled like sun-struck worms from a pill box,

their faces scaled like snakes in the old wall's

peeling paint.

And I wondered who buried them

but lay in the sweet summer grass unafraid

until the black-and-white war was done. Barrages

stopped. Helmeted winners of medals marched home.

Still the film reeled on, to Buchenwald, Dachau,

where bulldozers shoved gray bones into pits

without ritual, where the living were mute,

fluoroscopic ghosts you called D.P.'s, real stick people

crushed into huts like our mildewed sheds.

Out of your sight, in the dark, I cried

for them all, and for the man with a child

thinner than any mountain stray. His face,

framed in a single paint chip, leaned into the yard

and, with eyes like the half-blind bank mules'

at the mines, he seemed to stare at the light

from my bedroom window.

After the films

had run out, while your friends were gathering plates

or whispering good-night, I sat by your polished

brown shoes, wanting to say,

The man...,

that he held that child in his coat-hanger arms

then shoved him through the warp in the lapped boards

covering our coop. That the boy was in there

huddled in the dung and feathers, waiting.

But you never knew how he clung

to those humid walls with the hens

or how the flung door's slicing trapezoid of light

cornered him in shadow.

You were occupied with death

while every day I trooped the darkened rows of nests,

gathering the still-warm eggs with held breath.