For the Dead Union
a savage servility slides by on grease
After summer rain, the old-growth forest
behind Greendale Cemetery fills
with eerie promise—boletes, milk-caps,
and terraces of pink-white oysters,
while the veterans of remembered wars
doze on beneath deep mattresses of moss
and gaudy rhododendrons wide as mansions.
Even this far west, five hundred miles
from Bunker Hill, Daughters of the Revolution
have graves to tend, as do the offspring
of those who fell at Shiloh and Khe Sahn.
Fresher mud roofs the new pandemic dead.
Paying no heed to local history,
remote or absurdly new, quick streams gush
the layered shale embankments, cut ravines
so steep old gravestones sometimes slide
from their tidy, metered plots to murmur
obituary greetings from below.
I’ve sometimes brushed their faces clear of dirt
while out foraging, sounding out the names.
If the rains are right, by mid-July
the first chanterelles tunnel up through leaves,
timid as small flames for a day, before
rising bold as Corinthian columns
into the mist—fluted, comically orange,
and not reeking of funeral soil
but scented improbable apricot
—hints of death’s most subtle literacy.
⁜
Atop the city’s other distinguished hill
the college buildings shrug, clutch their ivy.
The old observatory, named for Captain Newton,
who fought with the Union at Corinth,
is really just another church—its design
cruciform, compassed north, domed with green copper,
its Doric narthex cheerful as a crypt.
The students only stroll downhill for booze,
wary of the red-capped, red-faced whites
who fly the Dixie flag from their new trucks
and shop at Giant Eagle packing heat,
the same men who join militias in the woods
across French Creek, where young George Washington
once paddled his canoe. On Braveheart Radio
the new patriots whine and stockpile ammo,
their sniggers ringing in the city’s ears.
Some years back, I read a student essay
that not once, but twice referred to Lowell’s
“For the Dead Union” by mistake, a bit
too apt, only months after Charlottesville.
My children practice active-shooter drills
at school, though I fear almost as much in-
active shooters, my well-armed small-town
neighbors, who see mostly through the dark glass
of their rage. Tonight, carting groceries to my car,
I had to dodge a pickup flying an upside
down American flag. On bumper rust:
BELIEVE IN GOD NOT GOV SCIENCE.
⁜
Our city boomed in the cross-hairs
of an infant nation—a half-way stop
on the New York to Chicago rail,
and a stop, too, for those running north
underground: at his busy safe-house
near the corner of Liberty and Arch,
the freedman Richard Henderson
sheltered hundreds, working the secret line
a local firebrand had established
out of his tannery in New Richmond
—young John Brown, who buried his first wife
and two children on a hill behind his barn.
Downtown, at Diamond Park, the cast-iron fish
of the faux-Bernini fountain gasp,
since their water was turned off years ago.
The new, most savage servility here
bends low to the con, believing nothing
but what’s been fetched from the extremes
of explanation: the virus a hoax,
and micro-chips, and deep state cabals,
with a million orange ballots hid somewhere
in a blue car with Arizona plates.
The local Klan are now just Oath Keepers,
dismissing any mention of a coup.
In my Night Owl hockey league, machinists,
plumbers, and professors hit the ice, work
off their beer. On the trophy, last season’s
champs christened their team The White Nationalists.
⁜
A thousand small-town Midwestern greens
are now deserted as dead factories,
guarded by bronze, musket-clutching soldiers
who can’t recall which fields, of which republic,
are engraved on the plaques at their feet,
nor how many Lenape or Shawnee
were scythed to speed the frantic engines
of American pastoral. In the woods
we return to reason and faith…
until faith bends reason towards disbelief
in the great frontier towns, whose fates are geared
to the greater green lights of commerce.
Like Talon, now gone for thirty years,
where generations had fed their fortunes
making zippers—patented here in 1914.
The city nearly died when the plant moved east.
I have tried to remain one of the roughs
all my life, but maybe we’ve had enough
of roughness now. As I marched across campus
at dusk, I scared an owl from its hollow
in a split oak by the observatory.
I thought of the telescope inside,
good for looking far away from here,
and the quiet power of such refraction,
those quick bends in the direction of light.
At the base of the owl’s rotting tree,
a clump of Jack-o’lantern mushrooms
were casting spores, just beginning to glow.
